A 14th century illustration of Dante’s Ninth Circle
Thursday
Because I had a biopsy yesterday to test for prostate cancer, I’m feeling rather groggy at the moment. As a result, you’re receiving a shorter than normal post, this one about the character Dante and his guide Virgil in The Divine Comedy.
An explanation here requires some delicacy so here’s my effort to spare you. First of all, to gain samples, my urologist had to (as we used to say as kids) “put it where the sun don’t shine.” Thankfully, unlike the first time the procedure was performed, I was anesthetized. (Don’t ask me about that first time!)
The good news is that, although I won’t get test results for another week, the doctor didn’t find anything obvious. In order to reassure me, however, he had to venture first into a dark wood.
Which brings me to Divine Comedy. Satan presides over the ninth circle of Inferno, which is to say the level furthest from God. Dante has long since discovered that, to deal with his crisis of faith, he must first acknowledge/journey through the darkest features of humanity. In Inferno’s last canto, there is a literal 180-degree turn as he and Virgil climb through Satan to get to Purgatory.
“Through” is the operative preposition. The center of hell is the devil’s rear end, and the winds that buffet the travelers are clearly flatulence (as are the winds that blow in the infernal regions of Milton’s Paradise Lost). In a brief intermission between gusts, Dante and Virgil begin their journey down Satan’s thighbone, which scholars like Norman O. Brown see as a euphemism for the anus:
Then, as he [Virgil] bade, about his neck I curled My arms and clasped him. And he spied the time And place; and when the wings were wide unfurled
Set him upon the shaggy flanks to climb And thus from shag to shag descended ‘Twixt matted hair and crusts of frozen rime.
And when we had come to where the huge thighbone Rides in its socket at the haunch’s swell, My guide, with labor and great exertion,
Turned head to where the feet had been, and fell To hoisting himself up upon the hair, So that I thought us mounting back to Hell.
Given that the earth is a globe, however, they are not mounting back up to hell but rather away from it. Dante concludes Inferno with encouraging words:
He first, I following; till my straining sense Glimpsed the bright burden of the heavenly cars Through a round hole; by this we climbed, and thence
Came forth, to look once more upon the stars.
So there you have it: my courageous doctor climbed through my round hole so that I can (hopefully for many more years) gaze upon the stars.
Okay, that’s enough.
More on Scatological Dante In a past post I shared a delightful doggerel version Divine Comedy, written by my father, making clear the symbolism connected with Satan. You can read the whole thing here but here’s a sampling:
[Dante] put his dream in poetry And gave it to the press And it sold a million copies And a million more I guess And everybody read it And began to look around For the Tower of Jesus the Flower of Mary and Satan the hole in the ground.
After seeing my post where I cited William Drennan’s “Wake of William Orr” to honor Renee Good and Alex Petti, a reader shared a poem by International Workers of the World organizer Ralph Chaplin. Most famous for the socialist anthem “Solidarity Forever,” Chaplin was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917 for opposing America’s entry into World War I. He may have written “Mourn Not the Dead” in Chicago’s Cook County Jail in 1917.
Chaplin was radicalized as a child when he saw a man shot dead during the Pullman strike of 1894, leading us to wonder how many of our young people will be similarly radicalized by the actions of Trump’s goons. Chaplin would go on to work with Mother Jones during the bloody 1912-13 coal miners’ strike in Kanawha County, West Virginia in 1912-13. He must have felt horribly alone when war fever swept through the United States in 1917, when the public was willing to countenance the suspension of various civil liberties.
Fortunately, his poem about “the apathetic throng” applies to fewer people today than it would have a year ago as increasing numbers of Americans are turning out to protest the ICE raids and other Trump assaults on democracy. For instance, Rachel Maddow reported Monday on how even people in red states are managing to block the construction of immigrant concentration camps.
Unfortunately, we have many “cowed and meek” members of Congress that continue to allow Trump to have his way in all things. Having witnessed his ability to unleash his supporters on anyone who disagrees with him, they “dare not speak.”
Mourn Not the Dead By Ralph Chaplin
Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie — Dust unto dust — The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die As all men must;
Mourn not your captured comrades who must dwell — Too strong to strive — Each in his steel-bound coffin of a cell, Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng — The cowed and the meek — Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong And dare not speak!
For what it’s worth, history is watching and taking names. And providing a spur to action.
Of the many ICE horror stories emerging out of Minneapolis, there’s one that caught my particular attention because the agents violated a sacred law that dates back to Homer’s time and earlier. Apparently four agents dined at a family-owned Mexican restaurant and then, after the restaurant closed, followed the staff home and arrested three of them.
To break bread in someone’s establishment and then turn around and abuse that establishment chills the blood.
It is violation of a host’s hospitality, of course, that sets off the Trojan War: Paris runs off Menelaus’s wife Helen after the Spartan king has welcomed him into his home. It takes a crime of this magnitude to bring the Greek city states together to launch their assault.
Then there is the incident of Odysseus with the Kyklopês Polyphemus, although in this case it is the host who violates the laws of hospitality. Odysseus brings a goatskin full of sweet wine hoping to meet the cave dweller. What he encounters instead is a host who rejects the laws set down by Zeus, eating rather than entertaining his guests. Odysseus reports on their interchange:
“We would entreat you, great Sir, have a care for the gods’ courtesy; Zeus will avenge the unoffending guest.”
He answered this from his brute chest, unmoved:
‘You are a ninny, or else you come from the other end of nowhere, telling me, mind the gods! We Kyklopês care not a whistle for your thundering Zeus or all the gods in bliss; we have more force by far.
The difference between the Kyklopês and the Greeks is the difference between barbarism and civilization. Odysseus describes them as “giants, louts, without a law to bless them,” which pretty much sums up ICE and Border Patrol agents.
Of course, the epic also features the ultimate abuse of a host’s hospitality, which Odysseus sums up when he returns to wreak vengeance. While I don’t wish for Trump’s federal agents to suffer the fate of Penelope’s suitors, I do wish them to be held accountable. Here’s Odysseus after he throws off his disguise and confronts them, bow and arrows in hand:
You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder, twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared bid for my wife while I was still alive. Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven, contempt for what men say of you hereafter. Your last hour has come. You die in blood.
As a democracy, our own “gods who rule wide heaven” are the Constitution and the rule of law, which ICE and Border Patrol are busily trashing. Contempt for these and “for what men say of you hereafter” pretty much sums up Trump and everyone following his example.
A literary quotation from Lord of the Rings has been making the rounds recently on social media. You can see why:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
I find it significant that Tolkien may have written the passage either immediately before or during World War II, with Hitler on the rise and England threatened. Although Tolkien always insisted that he was not writing allegory, it’s also true that history influences the shape that fictions take. It’s reasonable to think that Hitler is behind the creation of Sauron, Stalin as influencing Saruman, and their uneasy alliance as the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. Sauron’s storm troopers, after all, are the Nazgul.
For our own part, as we note resemblances between America today and 1930’s Germany, it makes sense that we would revisit Frodo and Gandalf’s conversation. The passage seems even more relevant when one reads what comes immediately before and after. Frodo’s remark occurs in response to Gandalf’s news update:
“But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord. The rumors that you have heard are true: he has indeed arisen again and left his hold in Mirkwood and returned to his ancient fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor. That name even you hobbits have heard of, like a shadow on the borders of old stories. Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.”
While Trump hasn’t taken another shape, he has indeed returned following a defeat and a respite.
Gandalf then points out the stakes. Although Sauron’s plans are “far from ripe,” they are ripening by the day. He will be able to consolidate his power if he regains the ring of power, at which point he will be able to “beat down all resistance, break the last defenses, and cover all the lands in a second darkness.”
We can think of Trump in these terms as well. At the moment, he is experimenting to see how much he can get away with, whether it involves unleashing masked thugs on American cities, seizing voting records in Fulton County, defying court orders, or the like. When Gandalf recounts how Sauron has gained control of lesser rings, ensnaring the once “proud and great” men who possessed them, we can think of the institutions that Trump has coopted that were supposed to function as guardrails of democracy. These include the GOP, the Supreme Court, the corporate media (especially CBS and The Washington Post), the Department of Justice, an independent FBI, and others. “Long ago,” Gandalf says, “they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants.”
And a little later, “These nine he has gathered to himself.”
It is fitting that it comes down to unassuming hobbits—or in our case, everyday citizens in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and now Minneapolis—to defeat Sauron. Although the outcome of our battle is far from over, some political pundits have already started talking like Sam Gamgee as they imagine history recording the people of Minnesota standing up to Trump’s Nazgul. Here’s Sam as he and Frodo sit at the foot of an erupting Mount Doom after the ring has been destroyed:
“What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?” he said. “I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part.”
Trump has not yet consolidated all the power available to him. The next No Kings demonstrations are on March 28.
Today in church we will hear one of the most beloved passages from the Old Testament prophets. Many know the final lines of Micah 6:1-8, about justice, kindness, and humility, but what leads up to it is equally important because God (through Micah) is informing the people of what they don’t have to do. Although God “brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery,” She isn’t asking a lot in return:
“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
This year those final lines—“do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God”– have provided our church with the theme for our Adult Forum, held every Sunday morning between the two services. We have heard or will hear faculty members from the Sewanee seminary talk about the commitment to justice as it appears in the Torah, the New Testament, Paul’s letters, and the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition. Also on the program are advocates for immigrants recounting stories, former members of law enforcement discussing violence, and our rector walking us through the Jewish tradition of welcoming “the stranger in our midst.” Speakers have shared their experiences working with urban homelessness and Appalachian poverty, and national experts have talked about René Girard’s theories of scapegoating and mimetic desire; Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s attempts to get the church to stand up to Hitler; and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Clarion Call for Justice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Although I say it as the chief organizer, it is an extraordinary program, especially for a church as small as ours.
The word from Micah’s passage that particular resonates with me is “kindness,” which puts me in mind of a Henry James declaration:
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Kindness also gets mentioned twice in Wordsworth’s masterpiece Tintern Abbey, the first when it is present, the second time when it is absent. The “best portion of a good man’s life,” he writes, are “his little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love.” Later he assures us that the “quietness and beauty” of Nature can sustain us when we encounter “greetings where no kindness is.” This coldness he puts in the same category as “evil tongues,” “rash judgments, “sneers of selfish men,” and “all the dreary intercourse of daily life.”
In this spirit, then, I share a simple but powerful poem by Emily Dickinson about kindness:
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.
That, Micah assures us, is all that God’s asks of us.
The next six years after our return from Yugoslavia are a bit of a blur, but having just read a cache of e-mails that Julia printed out at the time, I now understand why: our lives were unbelievably busy, what with having three boys heavily involved in sports (which meant constant chauffeuring) and Julia serving as assistant to the Dean of the Faculty, then returning to middle school teaching for a short stint, and then living in College Park during the week to work towards a PhD at the University of Maryland. We did three years of family counseling; I ran a faculty writing group in the summer to help others and myself with their/my research; we both enrolled in some intensive leadership training courses; and I served on our church’s vestry.
Then there were the two Slovenian students, followed by two Ethiopian refugee-students and an older returning student, who lived with us for a while (in our four bedroom ranch house with one bathroom); turmoil at the college over an African American professor claiming that the president had made a racist remark; and our family moving three times. All this while I was continuing to develop my courses and incorporating into them elements of “collaborative learning” to spur more engagement.
There were emails from those years because I was emailing Julia daily when I was single-parenting and she was in College Park. From my current vantage point of retirement, our life at that time seems utterly insane. Yet (such is the perversity of workaholism and perfectionism) we were actually proud of ourselves for taking on so much. (There’s a reason why Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its critique of the pride of perfectionism, is among my favorite works.)
The literature I was teaching and the books that the kids were reading provided a kind of anchor during this tumultuous time. Reading through the emails, I note one where 13-year-old Justin can’t tear himself away from Wrinkle in Time while (in notes to Julia) 11-year-old Darien tells of how he is immersed in Huckleberry Finn (“Right now Jim and Huck have just left the feuding families of the Shepherdsons and I can’t remember the name of other family”), and nine-year-old Toby reports that he is working his way through the Narnia series (“I am reading the Silver Chair and Jill and Eustace have just met Puddleglum. I like Trumpkin too, he’s very simple since he has become almost deaf”). I also see that I was reading them E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods and recall, with this book and others with multiple-person groups, asking the boys which character they liked the best. (The question can lead to good discussions and reveal, in an indirect way, your children’s anxieties and concerns. This works well also with movies like Stand by Me and League of Their Own.)
At the college, meanwhile, my Restoration and 18th Century British Literature class had morphed from “Rakes and Bawds” into “Couples Comedy,” the change brought about by the film genre classes that I was also teaching. In Couples Comedy I started with the very bawdy and very witty poems of John Wilmot, moved on to William Wycherley’s Country Wife and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (both of which feature characters based on the dissolute Wilmot), and then dove into Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, poems by Lady Wortley Montagu, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, and Fanny Burney’s Evelina. I finished up with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
In the course we looked at Thomas Hobbes’s and the Earl of Shaftesbury’s conflicting theories of comedy (comedy as aggressive and predatory, comedy as sympathetic and communal) and traced the evolution from the harsh comedy of the Restoration to the more sentimental comedy of the 18th century. Austen provided us with a nice summation since she balances biting satire with Romantic sentiment in her novel.
I’ve mentioned how I was drawn to study the 18th century because of Tom Jones, and the novel certainly has the hallmarks of a romantic comedy. I loved Fielding’s wit and his open-hearted approach to life, although in later years I came to realize that Fielding is using comedy as a defense against the rising middle class, who are threatening his entitled gentry way of life. If I have always loved comedy, preferring Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest to the tragedies (although I love them as well), it’s in part because I am drawn to their vision of community, which they invariably assert in the end. My own privileged life has assured me that, whatever turmoil we face, all will turn out well.
As much as I loved teaching 18th century literature, however, my Minority Literature courses probably did more immediate good since we were able to address hot button issues of race. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, like all Maryland college and universities at the time, was under a court order to dramatically increase its minority population after our long history of segregation, and the result was both exciting and tumultuous. But even though angry words were sometimes voiced in my class, literature provided us with a relatively safe space to explore the issues that were on all our minds.
I also applied collaborative teaching methods to the course and see myself reporting on one such experience in my e-mails at the time: “I just had a wonderful class on Song of Solomon, using dramatic reenactment. Talk about people moving into their roles! Quanda was Ruth (the mother), Eric Macon, Howard Milkman, Jenelle Hagar, Angela Pilate, and Robert Guitar. The book certainly comes alive from the effort and we all had a great time.”
I’ve mentioned in a past installment of this memoir of my great good fortune to have had African American poet Lucille Clifton as a colleague during these years. I taught her collection Quilting every year in Introduction to Literature and had many rich conversations with her. I also saw her call bullshit on the Black faculty member accusing the president of racism (which served to defuse the issue), even as she also alerted me to certain blindnesses I myself held. I wrote in that past post about her “note to self,” in which she catches me (yes, the occasion of the poem was about something I had said in a panel discussion) trying to frame race issues in ways that let me off the hook, but I want to look at another passage from the poem. In it, she gets at what she offered St. Mary’s College, as well as commenting on her own ambiguous status. She is talking about how she has had to comfort our Black students when faculty like me could not see that they were suffering:
as if i have not reached across our history to touch, to soothe on more than one occasion and will again, although the merely human is denied me still and i am now no longer beast but saint
Yes, in some ways we treated Lucille as a saint, which she could experience as a burden. Still, she was wonderful to have as a colleague and a friend.
From our house south of the campus, we had moved half an hour north because we thought that Julia would have a career in Washington. However, we found a community close to the college filled with our kids’ friends and decided that living there made more sense. We had to wait two years before occupancy and so spent that year living in our church’s rectory (vacant at the time) and then another year as we traveled to Slovenia for a second Fulbright. More on that next week.
Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure has a passage that the United States needs right now:
O, it is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.
Isabella is begging the cold-hearted Angelo to pardon her brother, whom he has sentenced to death on a technicality, but we can imagine her saying something similar to Donald Trump. After all, our president has been using the awesome power of the U.S. military and of the federal government like a giant. We need Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, to come to our rescue.
Vincentio has put his deputy Angelo in charge of the city while he supposedly journeys to Poland on a diplomatic mission. In actuality, he disguises himself as a friar to monitor how well Angelo will perform his duties. He sees his designated leader promptly enact draconian measures, including ordering the execution of young Claudio for impregnating Juliet, even though they are well on their way to getting married. Angelo also orders all of the brothels in town to be torn down, which as one character wryly observes will work only if he also gelds and spays all the youth of the city.
Angelo’s crackdown is a lot like Trump using his narrow victory over Kamala Harris as license to enact authoritarian measures. Indeed, his complicated rationale for executing Claudio bears some resemblance to the intricate reasons ICE has been citing for deporting people who have been living in the U.S. peacefully for years, with some of them having special protected status. Meanwhile, we have been witnessing our own version of Angelo’s brutality.
There’s another parallel. Righteous Angelo starts lusting after Isabella after she begs for the life of her brother and offers her a deal: her body for a pardon.
Now, I could comment on Trump’s own corrupt pardons or on the deal he has made with the evangelical right (power if they give up their Christian principles). For today’s essay, however, I have something Minnesota-related in mind. Although ICE’s “Metro Surge” is supposedly about capturing and deporting dangerous immigrants, it appears that the critical factor is Minnesota voting against Trump in three successive elections. This became clear when Attorney General Pam Bondi, acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, offered Minnesota Governor Tim Walz a proposition: hand over the state’s voting records and we’ll withdraw ICE.
Jay Quo at the Substack blog Status Quo outlines what’s so frightening about this offer. Through voter records, which are kept private and maintained by top election officials in each state, it is possible to tell “who voted, what party they belong to, what race they are, what gender they are, how old they are, where they live, and who the strongest base supporters are based on voting history.” With such data, Kuo notes, “the Trump regime could cause real mayhem in the midterm elections, undermine confidence in the results and even use it to stay in power.” For instance, such voter information can be used in voter suppression efforts.
Shakespeare’s version of the deal Bondi has offered Walz is Angelo’s quid pro quo to Isabella. He puts it as a hypothetical, asking her how she would behave if a “supposed” someone offered her clemency for her brother in exchange for her body. This someone, of course, is himself:
When she threatens to expose Angelo for his corrupt offer, he informs her that no one will believe her, given his reputation for purity and austerity. Then he moves in for the kill, giving his “sensual race the rein.” Either “fit thy consent to my sharp appetite,” he tells her, or Claudio gets torture (“lingering sufferance”) in addition to execution:
The prospect of Trump’s false o’erweighing our true is what is currently keeping us awake at night. And unfortunately, we don’t have a Vincentio secretly watching over us and intervening to save the day. Thanks to the duke’s machinations, Claudio and Juliet are saved, Angelo is exposed, and Vincentio himself marries Isabella.
Then again, the citizens of Minneapolis have shown us that there might be a Vincentio to save us after all, that being “we the people.” Their heroism and resolve have caused Trumpism to hesitate and even withdraw somewhat. Although we don’t know the final outcome, either in Minnesota or in the country as a whole, mass protests and a fervid allegiance to democracy look like they are packing a punch.
When my faculty book group discussed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night last week, I gained a new insight into Vice-President J.D. Vance: he’s a Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
Vance has pretty much failed every character test with which he’s been presented, but he surpassed even himself earlier this month when he said, after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good through her car window, that the man “is protected by absolute immunity” and that “he was doing his job.” While this permission structure may not have directly led to the subsequent murder of Alex Pretti, it didn’t help.
Vance has since walked back the “absolute” although he did so in his characteristic mealy-mouthed fashion:
I didn’t say and I don’t think anyone in the Trump administration said that officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. That’s absurd. What I did say is that when federal law enforcement officers violate the law that’s typically something federal officials would look into. We don’t want these guys to have kangaroo courts.
Speaking of kangaroo courts, Trump’s Department of Justice then figured that it should investigate Good and her partner, not Ross. Oh, and Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as well (for inciting).
It’s a consensus view that Vance, who once suggested that Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” reeks of inauthenticity. It’s as though he says mean things because he believes this will earn him favors with Trump and the MAGA faithful. Instead of coming off as an obnoxious bully-in-charge, however, he appears merely weak and pathetic.
Which is how Sir Andrew appears in Twelfth Night.
Andrew is in Lady Olivia’s household because Sir Toby, her uncle, has persuaded him that he has a shot at marrying her. In actuality, he has no chance at all, which Toby knows full well. As the Twelfth Night Lord of Misrule, however, Toby likes to create mayhem however he can. He also wants to drain Sir Andrew of every last cent. “If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way out,” Andrew moans after Toby instructs him to send for more money.
Like Vance, Andrew is the kid who is desperate to be one of the populars. While he thinks he can impress the gang by talking tough, however, he overshoots the mark, as in the following interchange:
MARIA Marry, sir, sometimes he [Malvolio] is a kind of puritan. SIR ANDREW O, if I thought that I’ld beat him like a dog! SIR TOBY BELCH What, for being a puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear knight? SIR ANDREW I have no exquisite reason for’t, but I have reason good enough.
“Absolute immunity,” Vance said, sounding tough. And then failed to provide exquisite reason.
At times Andrew, like Vance, just echoes whatever the older man is saying. Note the scene where Toby is complimenting Maria for arranging the Malvolio prank:
Hanging with the cool kids, however, doesn’t protect you from their cruelty, as Andrew will discover when he himself becomes the butt of one of Toby’s pranks. Judging Viola/Cesario to be a coward and knowing Andrew to be one as well, Toby arranges a duel between the two of them. Assuring Andrew that “Cesario” is sure to back down, Toby goads him into writing a challenge, which is as waffling as a Vance declaration:
While appearing to endorse the letter, Toby has as much contempt for his companion as Trump has for Vance. Knowing that the note will expose Sir Andrew as a “clodpole,” he chooses to deliver the challenge verbally:
Now will not I deliver his letter: for the behavior of the young gentleman gives him out to be of good capacity and breeding; his employment between his lord and my niece confirms no less: therefore this letter, being so excellently ignorant, will breed no terror in the youth: he will find it comes from a clodpole. But, sir, I will deliver his challenge by word of mouth…
Unlike Trump, Toby ultimately faces consequences for his behavior, although he takes down Andrew with him. (“Everything Trump touches dies,” says Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson about those who associate themselves with the man.) Mistaking Viola’s twin brother for Viola/Cesario, Toby and Andrew try to fight with him and end up with broken heads. As Andrew reports, “we took him for a coward, but he’s the very devil incardinate.” In fact, Andrew appears to have the same sense of justice that Vance has:
So again, the Justice Department believes that the struck, not the strikers, must be prosecuted. That decision has led roughly half a dozen federal prosecutors in Minnesota and several supervisors in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division in Washington to resign, according to the Associated Press.
Andrew finally discovers what Toby really thinks of him at the end of the play when he offers him comforting companionship:
Mike Pence, who sold his soul to be Trump’s first vice-president, thought that his loyalty would earn him his boss’s gratitude, only to see Trump sic an angry mob on him. Why does Vance think things will turn out better for him? His best hope is for Trump to die in office. (His odds of this happening are actually better than Andrew marrying Olivia.)
About Andrew’s name (Aguecheek or, as Toby calls him at one point, Agueface): face ague is a now obsolete phrase for a neuralgic disorder involving facial swelling or facial pain. Vance, for his part, is so embarrassed by his cherubic face that he has covered it up with a beard.
Oh, and while I’m stretching things, Andrew at one point—in his moment of greatest vulnerability and humanity—sadly recalls, “I was adored once.” In Vance’s case, his hillbilly grandmother (“mamaw”) adored him once as well.
Vance built a career by writing about their relationship. And now here he is, passing that adoration along to “America’s Hitler.”
For the second day in a row, I offer up an 18th century poem that has Trump’s number. I thought of William Cowper’s line “great princes have great playthings” after reading an Atlantic article by Jonathan Rauch where he talks about Trump’s “effort to make the government his personal plaything.”
Rauch is responding to an observation, by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, that the president
listens to Putin, he listens to Xi, he listens to how they talk about governing unburdened by uncooperative legislatures, unconcerned with what the judiciary may do, and he thinks to himself, Why can’t I do that? This doesn’t amount to being a fascist, in my view, [or] having a theory of how you want to govern. It’s just Why can’t I have the same fun they have?”
Rauch cites Bolton only to disagree with him, however. Whereas he too once worried about applying “fascist” to Trump—after all, leftwing activists have often proved too facile in their use of the word—not to use apply it when it is clearly appropriate is perverse. Here’s his account of what has changed:
Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.
Cowper’s own concern about self-indulgent monarchs appears in The Task, a long and brilliant poem taking up six books. As one reads the passage in 2026, one can’t help but think of Trump. For instance, DJT’s White House ballroom and his slapping his name on the Kennedy Center come to mind when Cowper mentions kings’ attempts “t’immortalize their bones”:
Great princes have great playthings. Some have play’d At hewing mountains into men, and some At building human wonders mountain-high. Some have amus’d the dull, sad years of life (Life spent in indolence, and therefore sad) With schemes of monumental fame; and sought By pyramids and mausoleum pomp, Short-lived themselves, t’ immortalize their bones.
More concerning, however, is when the plaything is one’s armed forces, which Cowper turns to next. One thinks here how Trump has enjoyed ordering bombing raids in Yemen, Iran, and Nigeria and how he saw the kidnapping of Venezuelan head Nicolás Marduro as a made-for-tv spectacle. He relished how possessing the world’s most powerful military allowed him to swagger before the heads of Europe about seizing Greenland, and sending ICE agents to terrorize Democratic cities has its own particular satisfaction. Cowper’s reference to “puny hands” reminds us of Trump’s insecurity about his own small hands:
Some seek diversion in the tented field, And make the sorrows of mankind their sport. But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at. Nations would do well T’ extort their truncheons from the puny hands Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds Are gratified with mischief; and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world.
An infirm and baby mind that is gratified with mischief? One who spoils for confrontation just because he can get away with it? Whether or not one calls it fascist, it fits.
Yes, nations would do well “t’extort their truncheons.” Congress, it’s within your power.
