Speak in Thy Still Small Voice

William Brassey Hole, Elijah in the Desert of Horeb

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Sunday

One of the Biblical passages that makes me nostalgic for the King James Bible involves Elijah straining to hear the voice of God at a moment of despair. “Sheer silence,” which appears in the New Revised Standard Version, may be clearer than “still small voice,” but I experience the change as a loss. Here’s the RVSV version of the passage in which the phrase appears:

Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.”

And now for the King James Version:

And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

If Elijah expects high drama, such as Moses experienced when receiving the Ten Commandments, he is disappointed. God sometimes adopts a quieter approach, one to be received more through meditation than as a spectator of grand theatrics. English religious poet Anna Shipton (1815-1901) prefers it this way.

Shipton informs us that the “still small voice” can reach her in a way that thunder, whirlwind, and tempest cannot. In her case, it takes such quietness to silence the tempest going on in her own mind. She must be handled gently if she is to experience God’s grace:

The Still Small Voice
By Anna Shipton

“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.”—Psalm xxxii. 8.

Speak to me, Lord! not in the thunder cloud, 
Nor in the whirlwind, lest I hear and die; 
Nor let the fearful tempest, hurling loud, 
Fright my sad soul with its iniquity. 
Speak in Thy still small voice, as it is heard 
By patient watchers waiting at Thy feet; 
O gracious Spirit! by Thy Holy Word Draw 
Thou the sinner to Thy mercy-seat. 
Man doth make dark Thy counsel. Oh, speak 
Thou Till a great calm subdues the billows wild! 
Thy grace sufficeth! Lord, Thy grace bestow, 
And with Thy counsel guide Thy weakest child.

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Let Us Taunt Old Care with a Merry Air

Monet, Woman with Parasol

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Friday – Summer Solstice

With today being the Summer Solstice, here’s a poem by African American poet Paul Dunbar celebrating the season. If we open ourselves to the blue skies, “the freedom of lakes and lands,” and “the touch of the air’s soft hands,” we can “taunt old Care with a merry air.”

So go ahead and taunt.

In Summer
By Paul Dunbar

Oh, summer has clothed the earth
In a cloak from the loom of the sun!
And a mantle, too, of the skies’ soft blue,
And a belt where the rivers run.

And now for the kiss of the wind,
And the touch of the air’s soft hands,
With the rest from strife and the heat of life,
With the freedom of lakes and lands.

I envy the farmer’s boy
Who sings as he follows the plow;
While the shining green of the young blades lean
To the breezes that cool his brow.

He sings to the dewy morn,
No thought of another’s ear;
But the song he sings is a chant for kings
And the whole wide world to hear.

He sings of the joys of life,
Of the pleasures of work and rest,
From an o’erfull heart, without aim or art;
‘T is a song of the merriest.

O ye who toil in the town,
And ye who moil in the mart,
Hear the artless song, and your faith made strong
Shall renew your joy of heart.

Oh, poor were the worth of the world
If never a song were heard,—
If the sting of grief had no relief,
And never a heart were stirred.

So, long as the streams run down,
And as long as the robins trill,
Let us taunt old Care with a merry air,
And sing in the face of ill.

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Gwendolyn Brooks’ Primer for Juneteenth

Synthia Saint James, Juneteenth

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Thursday – Juneteenth

Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Primer for Blacks” (1980) is a wonderful poem for celebrating Juneteenth, the day chosen to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States. While acknowledging that many African Americans are defensive about their skin color and may even believe that “it’s Great to be white,” Brooks counters by telling her Black readers that they must “perceive your Glory.”

Doing so is not easy given the way that people can internalize racism, but Brooks is out to fix that. It requires committing to Blackness and realizing that “the world Black has geographic power.” After all, you can find Blackness everywhere and in a full range of hues, from rust-red to milk and cream to tan and yellow-tan to deep-brown to middle brown to high-brown to live and ochre. After all, if a single drop of Black blood makes one Black, as the American slave states contended (“O mighty drop”), then Blackness “pulls everybody in” and “stretches over the land.”

Brooks teels her readers that the primary object of her huge and pungent (sharp and stimulating ) project is for them “to Comprehend to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black.” This, she says “is our ultimate Reality,” and if her readers embrace the fact that they stand on this “lone ground,” then “meaningful metamorphosis” and “prosperous staccato” will arise, both for the individual and for the group as a whole.

Brooks’s primer, therefore is directed at all Blacks who are self-shriveled with self-hatred and self-doubt. (It is a beginner’s manual, after all.) Once they concede the “gaunt but marvelous” truth that they are in both outward appearance and foundational reality Black, then they like her will perceive their Glory.

Primer For Blacks
By Gwendolyn Brooks

Blackness
is a title,
is a preoccupation,
is a commitment Blacks
are to comprehend—
and in which you are
to perceive your Glory.

The conscious shout
of all that is white is
“It’s Great to be white.”
The conscious shout
of the slack in Black is
“It’s Great to be white.”
Thus all that is white
has white strength and yours.

The word Black
has geographic power,
pulls everybody in:
Blacks here—
Blacks there—
Blacks wherever they may be.
And remember, you Blacks, what they told you—
remember your Education:
“one Drop—one Drop
maketh a brand new Black.”
         Oh mighty Drop.
______And because they have given us kindly
so many more of our people

Blackness
stretches over the land.
Blackness—
the Black of it,
the rust-red of it,
the milk and cream of it,
the tan and yellow-tan of it,
the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it,
the “olive” and ochre of it—
Blackness
marches on.

The huge, the pungent object of our prime out-ride
is to Comprehend,
to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black,
which is our “ultimate Reality,”
which is the lone ground
from which our meaningful metamorphosis,
from which our prosperous staccato,
group or individual, can rise.

Self-shriveled Blacks.
Begin with gaunt and marvelous concession:
YOU are our costume and our fundamental bone.
      
      All of you—
      you COLORED ones,
      you NEGRO ones,
those of you who proudly cry
      “I’m half INDian”—
      those of you who proudly screech
      “I’VE got the blood of George WASHington in MY veins”
      ALL of you—
            you proper Blacks,
      you half-Blacks,
      you wish-I-weren’t Blacks,
      Niggeroes and Niggerenes.


      You.

The poem reminds me of Lucille Clifton’s “my dream about being white,” which seconds Brooks injunction to embrace one’s Black costume and gets at what Brooks means by “prosperous staccato”:

my dream about being white
By Lucille Clifton

hey music and
me
only white,
hair a flutter of
fall leaves
circling my perfect
line of a nose,
no lips,
no behind, hey
white me
and i’m wearing
white history
but there’s no future
in those clothes
so i take them off and
wake up
dancing.

Happy Juneteenth.

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Trump-Musk, Sauron-Saruman

Saruman-Sauron in Lord of the Rings

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Wednesday 

Unfortunately I saw too late this article in McSweeney’s on the Trump-Musk spat (with Trump as Sauron and Musk as Saruman) as it is now old news, the two having called a truce. As many predicted, the man who controls government contracts has the edge over the man who relies on them, and Musk has come slithering back, more like Wormtongue than Saruman. Nevertheless, the piece is still worth reading. Carlos Greaves really knows his Lord of the Rings, not to mention his Silmarillion.

I’m sure I don’t have to mention that Elon Musk once embraced Trump, pouring $250 million into his campaign. Saruman acknowledges, 

Did I facilitate Sauron’s rise to power by donating most of Isengard’s resources to his reconquest campaign and persuading my legions of Uruk-hai followers to support him? Sure. And did I know that Sauron was a corrupted Maiar with an Eru complex and an unquenchable thirst for power? Of course.

Now, however, he points out that he was never “a big Sauron fan,” adding, “To tell you the truth, I always hated the guy.” What he claims changed his mind was the way Sauron was prepared to bankrupt Middle-earth with his “Big Beautiful Bill Battalion”:

But after seeing Sauron’s new “Big, Beautiful Battalion,” it became clear that he wasn’t actually interested in reform, and only cared about destroying Middle-earth and ruling over the ashes. 

Saruman mentions Aragorn’s ancestor “slow-walking the destruction of the One Ring.” The reference here is either to Attorney General Merritt Garland, who waited far too long to indict Trump for his coup attempt, or Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who could have supported Democratic efforts to prevent Trump from ever running for office again. 

A note on Isildur: by failing to seize the ring rather than throw it into Mount Doom when he has the chance, the ancient king of Numenor serves as an illustration into how power corrupts. Even those fighting for the forces of good are susceptible. 

If Saruman allies himself with the bad guys, it’s partially because he (like Musk) is obsessed with DEI. When Sauron appeared to be on the ropes, Saruman notes, 

I had an important choice to make: Would I throw my support behind a feeble alliance of elves, men, dwarves, and hobbits? Or use my influence as the most powerful wizard to gain Sauron’s favor and help him rule over Middle-earth the right way? The choice was obvious. Elitist enclaves like Rivendell had become obsessed with all the wrong priorities, like putting a hobbit in charge of taking the Ring to Mordor when that’s clearly a job for a man.

Where Musk had the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Saruman has ORC, but the results are the same. If you put young technocrats in charge of dismantling everything from USAID to Social Security, you shouldn’t be surprised by the results:

When I created the One Ring Coalition, or ORC—the powerful group of goblins, balrogs, and ringwraiths I assembled to help reshape the Great Lands—I did it with the best of intentions. I wanted Middle-earth to run with the ruthlessly efficiency that only the spawn of Morgoth can accomplish. I also hoped ORC would rein in all of Sauron’s worst impulses.

I love how Musk’s young hotshots, including the 19-year-old software engineer who referred to himself as “Big Balls,” are called “the spawn of Morgoth,” the evil race featured in the Silmarillion.

Greaves’s satire goes on to imply that Musk’s change of heart came from how protesters have been targeting Tesla dealerships, prompting Tesla’s board of directors to pressure him to withdraw from politics. Saruman, of course, denies he has yielded to such pressure:

The cynics will tell you that I am distancing myself from Sauron only now that radical Ents are destroying my Uruk–hai breeding grounds and hurting my bottom line. But while flooding Isengard “in protest” is annoying, it’s hardly the reason I’m dissolving our partnership.

The truth is, this is about doing what’s right. It has nothing to do with the rumors that the White Council is threatening to kick me out if I don’t cut ties with Sauron. Or that my supply stock is dwindling now that the riders of Rohan have laid siege to Orthanc.

And to think, Musk used to be a hero to Ent-supporting environmentalists concerned about climate change.

So does this mean that Musk will turn his back on reactionary politics? While some Democrats initially expressed that hope, Greaves knew it would never happen. His Saruman concludes, 

As for those thinking that my falling out with Sauron means I’ll help the Council destroy the One Ring, think again.

This, in fact, is how things appear to have turned out, despite Saruman having mentioned Sauron’s “longstanding ties to Epstein Melkor and his dark deeds on the Island of Númenor.” (Musk now says that he “went too far.”) As a result, Saruman will continue to supply Mordor with Uruk-hai reinforcements. And be reimbursed in $auronCoin.

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Using Murakami to Explore MAGA Sadism

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Tuesday

I’ve been rereading some of my favorite Haruki Murakami novels, which serve as my comfort food, and am struck this time by the undercurrent of sadism that the author uncovers in Japanese society. (Some comfort, huh?) In 1Q84 there is child rape, in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle one reads about the atrocities committed by the Soviets and Japanese alike in Manchuria, and in Kafka on the Shore there’s an excruciating scene in which we watch a man torture cats. (Check out my previous post on toxic masculinity in Kafka on the Shore.)

It’s not only in Japan where one finds such sadism. As I watched our Secretary of Homeland Security call for the overthrow of California’s elected leaders, I thought of how last year she proudly announced shooting her dog Cricket.

Since becoming DHS secretary, Kristi Noem has continued her performance sadism. This past March she posed for photos of herself at CECOT, the Salvadoran concentration camp, with prisoners prominently featured behind bars in the background. Then, in her Friday press conference, she channeled Trumpian fascist fantasies. “We are not going away,” she said after Trump had called in the California National Guard and the Marines to handle the non-riots in Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this Governor [Gavin] Newsom and this mayor [Karen Bass] placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.”

These remarks, essentially a call for a coup, were overshadowed by the handcuffing of California’s senior senator Alex Padilla when he attempted to ask a question. But they grow out of this administration’s ramped up rhetoric, including Donald Trump inciting soldiers to boo Newsom and Bass in a recent speech at a military base.

With Kafka on the Shore in mind, however, today I focus more on the sadism than the threats of a military coup. As I see it, sadism lies at the heart of the Trumpian project. For those who equate being American with being white, the fear of being “replaced” (as American fascists put it) can generate fantasies of inflicting violence on others. By announcing the shooting of Cricket, Noem signaled to Trump and the MAGA faithful that she was willing to override a soft heart and do what must be done to the enemy.

There’s a scene in the Bertolucci movie 1900 where Don Sutherland, playing the role of a Mussolini Black Shirt, picks up a cat, says, “Communists are smart. They play on your human feelings. They’re like this little pussycat,” and then hangs the animal with his belt. The action helps cement his leadership over the wannabe fascists in the room.

Kafka Tamura is a 15-year-old boy who has run away from his father, a well-known sculptor, because he fears that that he will “change into something I shouldn’t.” As he explains it, “I felt like if I stayed there I’d be damaged beyond repair.” We come to understand why when we see an avatar of his father paralyzing cats and then opening them up with a scalpel, tearing out their still beating hearts, and popping them in his mouth. The action is so horrifying that Mr. Nakata, an otherwise harmless old man who loves cats, succumbs to a spasm of anger and stabs him.

In this magical realist novel, it’s never clear what happens in real life and what is a metaphor. While it is unlikely that Kafka’s father actually kills cats in this way, the action is a metaphor for how he threatens to destroy the hearts of his family members. It is probably the reason why Kafka’s mother runs away from him, taking Kafka’s sister with her, but that leaves Kafka alone and unprotected with the man.

Before he is stabbed, Kafka’s father—whose avatar is the Kentucky whiskey Johnnie Walker icon—explains his project. He is killing these cats

to collect their souls, which I use to create a special kind of flute. And when I blow that flue it’ll let me collect even larger souls. Then I collect larger souls and make an even bigger flute. Perhaps in the end I’ll be able to make a flute so large it’ll rival the universe.

Although ordinary people can’t hear the flute, it is always there, affecting how we experience and interact with the world.

Murakami’s novels are filled with such sadism. Elsewhere in Kafka on the Shore we learn from World War II soldiers how to tear an enemy’s guts out with a bayonet, and we encounter an instance of left-wing student activists torturing and killing an innocent fellow student. In Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Japanese soldiers are ordered to kill Chinese prisoners with a baseball bat, and we see a Japanese soldier skinned alive in Manchuria. Human depravity seems to have no bounds.

The Trump administration, most notably White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, are testing America’s own bounds with its heartless deportations, rounding up beloved community members and sending people who have committed no crime to concentration camps in El Salvador, South Sudan, and elsewhere. Soul-destroying flute music is becoming the background music for our lives.

In Kafka on the Shore Murakami explores two possible responses to such abominations. The first involves violence. Kafka has an alter-ego, “the boy named Crow,” who at one point encounters the now-dead Johnnie Walker/Kafka’s father in a limbo world and attacks him with Oedipal fury. Rather than succumbing, however, Johnnie Walker only laughs at him, mocking his rage.

This attack is the dark fantasy of an emotionally abused son enacting revenge on his soul-destroying father. But instead of bringing him relief, the attack only increases the inner desolation. In pecking Johnnie Walker to obliteration, Crow discovers he has only created a soul-destroying flute:

Crow tore at the man’s tongue, grabbed it with his beak, and yanked with all his might. It was long and hugely thick, and once it was pulled out from deep within the man’s throat, it squirmed like a gigantic mollusk, forming dark words. Without a tongue, however, not even this man could laugh anymore. He looked like he couldn’t breathe, either, but still he held his sides and shook with soundless laughter. The boy named Crow listened, and this unheard laughter—as vacant and ominous as wind blowing over a far-off desert—never ceased. It sounded, in fact, very much like an otherworldly flute.

This violent response, in other words, replicates the violence of the father, setting off a never-ending cycle. It is because violence begets violence that protesters have been insisting on non-violent resistance to Trump’s fascist ambitions.

The other response, Kafka discovers, is to build a life for oneself through friendship, through love, through literature, music, and art, and through community. In the course of the novel we watch Kafka grow from a confused teenager defined by anger to one with a strong sense of self. By facing up to his inner darkness—it requires courage, discipline, and honest self-reflection to do so—he finds inner peace.

From this new starting point, he decides to return home to complete his schooling. And although, as he tells his alter-ego Crow during the bus ride home, “I still don’t know anything about life,” Crows points out that he has found guidance. “Look at the painting,” Crow says—the painting is of a boy gazing out to sea—“and listen to the wind.” Because of all he has experienced on his quest, Kafka will figure out what to do by opening his mind and his senses.

As a result (in the words of Milton), the future lies all before Kafka. Or to turn to the novel’s closing passage,

“You’d better get some sleep,” the boy named Crow says. “When you wake up, you’ll be part of a brand-new world.”

You finally fall asleep. And when you wake up, it’s true.

You are part of a brand-new world.

One other thought. Kafka is one of two protagonists in the novel, the other being Mr. Nakata. Nakata, who has had his mind emptied by an unexplained event involving an American airplane during World War II, functions as Kafka’s shadow side. After he kills Johnnie Walker, Mr. Nakata too sets out on a journey, in his case to find “the entrance stone.” In the process, he picks up a disciple, a tough truck driver, who sees in Mr. Nakata his beloved grandfather and helps him complete his quest.

This quest is a version of Kafka’s journey. The entrance stone, it turns out, leads to the unconscious, the home of the repressed anger and fear that lead to violence. This inner turmoil Murakami has traced to World War II, and by revisiting that era and facing up to it, Japan can transcend the urge toward sadistic violence that seethes beneath its surface.

Murakami has been somewhat controversial for how he reminds Japan of parts of its history it would prefer to forget. (This is also one reason he is popular with Japanese youth.) Many older Japanese would especially like to ignore the invasion of Manchuria, which is explored in Wind-Up Bird. Only by returning to the scene of the crime, however, can the country find peace.

In Kafka on the Shore Hoshino, the truck driver disciple finds the inner strength to kill the ugliness that dwells within the Japanese unconscious. As an ugly worm emerges from the now-dead Nakata’s mouth, seeking the entrance, Hoshino manages to overturn the stone, which has grown immensely heavy. After this, he is able to destroy the now aimless beast.

Linking up with Mr. Nakata enables Hoshino to find meaning in what has heretofore been a self-absorbed life. He rethinks his previous relationships with women and finds a new passion in the music of Beethoven.

America has been fairly good in recent years at revisiting its own past sins and has benefitted through a Renaissance where formerly oppressed groups have been able to follow their dreams and live up to their potential in unprecedented ways. The movement has also awakened us to the past so that the study of history has seldom been as vibrant as it is today.

Unfortunately, there are enough people who are threatened by this great awakening to take repressive measures in response, including electing a reactionary president. They want to pretend what we have learned about America’s history never happened, turning the positive word “woke” into a curse word. (Is it better to be asleep?) Sadism is integrally linked with the attempted erasure.

Murakami shows us the cost we pay when we yield to our fear and anger. He also, however, leads us to a healthy response through his magical realist plots. Maybe that’s why I find comfort in rereading him these days.

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A.A. Milne and a Squeaking Tank

E.H. Shepard, illus. of “The Knight Whose Armor Didn’t Squeak”

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Monday

As somewhere between four and six million Americans gathered around the country to protest Donald Trump’s attempted fascist takeover—despite threats of rain we drew 200+ to a rally in ruby red Winchester TN—the president got the military parade he’s been salivating over ever since his first term. Everyone knew that parade was for himself, not for the army’s 250th birthday or for Flag Day, and a hot mic moment made this clear. Asked off stage whether he would be inviting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to the White House, Trump responded admiringly, “He speaks and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.”

There were relatively few sitting up and paying attention upon this occasion. As the New York Times’ Shawn McCreesh reported at one point,

The energy level at the military parade here is a bit desultory. The crowds are calm and light, a bit sapped after waiting in the oppressive D.C. humidity for hours to make it to this point, and it’s now spitting rain. The announcer stopped with the neat history lesson just now and an instrumental version of Heart’s “Barracuda” is being blasted over the loudspeakers.

A tiny but revealing detail brings me to today’s poem. At one point a commentator who goes by the name “Tennessee Holler” observed on Bluesky, “Our military deserves better than this empty charade. Yikes. The tank squeaking over silence is incredible.” Another advised us to “watch the clip of that tank squeaking slowly and painfully along in silence, past empty stands, like a cartoon of abject sadness.” All of which put me in mind of the A.A. Milne poem, “The Knight Whose Armor Didn’t Squeak.”

Squeaking tank

I haven’t read the poem since my kids were young. When I revisited it, I saw a knight so averse to fighting and so puffed up with his view of himself (he thinks he’s smart because he can subtract 9 from 20) that he is affronted whenever anyone challenges him. Like our president, he finds ways to slither out of confrontation, not to mention actual fighting. As the poem informs us, Sir Thomas Tom

     felt that it was hardly fair
To risk, by frequent injuries,
A brain as delicate as his.

When he does respond to challenges from other knights, he always makes sure to be ensconced safely in his moated castle:

His castle (Castle Tom) was set
Conveniently on a hill;
And daily, when it wasn’t wet,
He paced the battlements until
Some smaller Knight who couldn’t swim
Should reach the moat and challenge him.

Call him TACO, as in Thomas-Tom Always Chickens Out.

To his credit, Trump braved the rain for the event Saturday, unlike the time in 2018 when he passed up visiting the graves of Americans who died in France during World War I for fear it would mess with his hair.

What most elevates Sir Thomas Tom in his own eyes is military spectacle. Just as Trump doesn’t want to be around military personnel who are fat or have disabilities, so Sir Thomas Tom wants armor that doesn’t squeak:

No other Knight in all the land
Could do the things which he could do.
Not only did he understand
The way to polish swords, but knew
What remedy a Knight should seek
Whose armor had begun to squeak.

The only time that Sir Thomas Tom ventures into combat is when he encounters another knight whose armor doesn’t squeak—which is to say, who has the same vanities as he has—and he thinks he has won a battle when he humiliates his foe. Yet even here his attack is underhanded and from behind. Who knows whether he would have engaged with the unfortunate Sir Hugh in full frontal assault.

In short, reading Milne’s poem as a parable of Saturday’s march, we can say that it’s about a man with no substance who loves military show. All hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas.

The Knight Whose Armor Didn’t Squeak
By A.A. Milne

Of all the Knights in Appledore
The wisest was Sir Thomas Tom.
He multiplied as far as four,
And knew what nine was taken from
To make eleven. He could write
A letter to another Knight.

No other Knight in all the land
Could do the things which he could do.
Not only did he understand
The way to polish swords, but knew
What remedy a Knight should seek
Whose armor had begun to squeak.

And, if he didn’t fight too much,
It wasn’t that he didn’t care
For blips and buffetings and such,
But felt that it was hardly fair
To risk, by frequent injuries,
A brain as delicate as his.

His castle (Castle Tom) was set
Conveniently on a hill;
And daily, when it wasn’t wet,
He paced the battlements until
Some smaller Knight who couldn’t swim
Should reach the moat and challenge him.

Or sometimes, feeling full of fight,
He hurried out to scour the plain,
And, seeing some approaching Knight,
He either hurried home again,
Or hid; and, when the foe was past,
Blew a triumphant trumpet-blast.

One day when good Sir Thomas Tom
Was resting in a handy ditch,
The noises he was hiding from,
Though very much the noises which
He’d always hidden from before,
Seemed somehow less….Or was it more?

The trotting horse, the trumpet’s blast,
The whistling sword, the armor’s squeak,
These, and especially the last,
Had clattered by him all the week.
Was this the same, or was it not?
Something was different. But what?

Sir Thomas raised a cautious ear
And listened as Sir Hugh went by,
And suddenly he seemed to hear
(Or not to hear) the reason why
This stranger made a nicer sound
Than other Knights who lived around.

Sir Thomas watched the way he went –
His rage was such he couldn’t speak,
For years they’d called him down in Kent
The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak!
Yet here and now he looked upon
Another Knight whose squeak had gone.

He rushed to where his horse was tied;
He spurred it to a rapid trot.
The only fear he felt inside
About his enemy was not
“How sharp his sword?” “How stout his heart?”
But “Has he got too long a start?”

Sir Hugh was singing, hand on hip,
When something sudden came along,
And caught him a terrific blip
Right in the middle of his song.
“A thunderstorm!” he thought. “Of course!”
And toppled gently off his horse.

Then said the good Sir Thomas Tom,
Dismounting with a friendly air,
“Allow me to extract you from
The heavy armor that you wear.
At times like these the bravest Knight
May find his armor much too tight.”

A hundred yards or so beyond
The scene of brave Sir Hugh’s defeat
Sir Thomas found a useful pond,
And, careful not to wet his feet,
He brought the armor to the brink,
And flung it in…and watched it sink.

So ever after, more and more,
The men of Kent would proudly speak
Of Thomas Tom of Appledore,
“The Knight Whose Armor Didn’t Squeak.”
Whilst Hugh, the Knight who gave him best,
Squeaks just as badly as the rest.

I know there are some who proudly speak of Donald Trump. Their claims on his behalf, however, generally wander into fantasy land.

Further thought: Upon reflection, I’m thinking that Milne’s poem may have been inspired by the Duke of Plaza-Toro in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers. Think of Trump as you read the description:

When, to evade Destruction’s hand,
To hide they all proceeded,
No soldier in that gallant band
Hid half as well as he did.
He lay concealed throughout the war,
And so preserved his gore, O!
That unaffected,
Undetected,
Well connected
Warrior,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

I think of how, following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman High School that claimed 17 lives, Trump stated, “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.” (This after calling the officer on duty “disgusting” for not having done so.) And then how he hid out in a bunker under the White House when demonstrators in nearby Lafayette Park protested the George Floyd murder.

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God the Father as Loving Protector

Guido Reni, St. Joseph with Infant Jesus

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Sunday

When I was thinking of a poem for today’s post—a religious lyric that would also celebrate Father’s Day–I initially thought of John Donne’s “Hymn to God the Father,” in which the speaker pleads with God to forgive him for his sins. These sins include sins that he continues to commit:

Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
         And do run still, though still I do deplore?

The final sin is doubting Jesus’s promise of life after death:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
         My last thread, I shall perish on the shore…

And always there is the refrain, with the poet punning on his name:

When thou hast done [forgiving], thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

As the speaker piles up all the different ways that he’s sinned, growing more desperate with each item on the list, the image of God as an angry parent becomes more entrenched. Even though Donne all but grabs God by the coat lapels and demands assurance—”swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son/ Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore”—I emerge from the poem exhausted. Is Christianity, at its core, a drama of anger, punishment, and scapegoat sacrifice, with Jesus offering himself up to placate an angry daddy. “Die he or Justice must; unless for him/ Some other able, and as willing, pay/ The rigid satisfaction, death for death,” thunders Milton’s God in Paradise Lost.

“Sinners in the hands of an angry god,” as Calvinist Jonathan Edwards would have it.

This is not my god. When I think of divinity as a father—which I occasionally do but just as often think of Her as mother—I imagine Him more as the father in Naomi Shihab Nye ‘s wonderful poem “Shoulders.” Such a god is one who loves us despite our faults, who doesn’t insist on punishment and blood sacrifice. We are the child that God, like Nye’s father, holds lovingly and protectively in his arms.

I remember holding my son Toby in my arms for three hours right after he was born as Julia went off to have a follow-up operation. Apparently the nurses told her later that they couldn’t get him away from me. I don’t remember them trying but I vividly remember the touch.

Shoulders
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

Though the road is indeed wide and the rain is falling, God hears the hum of our dreams, deep inside Him. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another,” Jesus told his disciples (John 13:34), and Nye gives us a powerful image of such love.

Happy Fathers Day.

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A.I. and the Tech Bro Accelerationists

Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein

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Friday

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, the Silicon Valley tech bros who support Donald Trump have more surprises for us. The other day the New York Times breathlessly reported,

Meta is said to be preparing to unveil an A.I. lab dedicated to a hypothetical system that exceeds the powers of the human brain

To which Tobias Wilson-Bates, my English professor son who studies A.I., replied with a literary passage you’re probably can identify:

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.

Not too much blessing—in fact, mostly undiluted cursing—occurs in Victor Frankenstein’s subsequent account of his technological breakthrough. For instance, here’s what his creation has to say:

“Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”

There’s no sign that Mark Zuckerberg has any qualms about what he’s attempting, and thanks to Greg Olear at the substack blog Prevail, I now have a word for what he’s up to—accelerationism—which Olear succinctly sums up as, “All gas, no brakes.”

Andy Beckett, British historian and Guardian journalist, describes the accelerationist philosophy:

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified—either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favor automation. They favor the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favor the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

 Beckett observes that the accelerationists run afoul of

conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.

They also don’t appear interested in Mary Shelley’s warning.

Speaking for the environment, Olear quotes Lady Macbeth, employing sarcasm to reveal accelerationism’s consequences:

What is the accelerationist attitude toward climate change? In the words of Lady Macbeth, “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.” Since humans are going to eventually destroy the earth’s habitability regardless, we might as well get a move on. Only when we’ve extracted all the fossil fuels from the ground, and all the “raw earth” minerals we need for our technological devices, will we understand what to do next. Therefore, accelerate the melting of the icecaps so we can drill baby drill in the Arctic Ocean! (To understand why Trump and Vance are so fixated on Greenland, just look at a map.) And if a lot of peasants and serfs and hoi polloi bite the dust in the process, so be it; we can always make more.

Olear points out that the Italian Futurists in the first decade of the 20th century embraced an early version of accelerationism and finds it no surprise that some of them would go on to embrace Mussolini fascism. In the famous 1909 Futurist manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Olear notes,

we find the seeds of the “manosphere” movement and the war on “wokeness,” inchoate accelerationism, and the inherent cruelty of a cult that values technology more than individual human life.

Marinetti’s manifesto called for poets to “sing the love of danger, the habit of energy, and the strength of daring,” and said that “the essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolution.” He embraced the beauty of the automobile, asserting that it is our version of ancient Greek statuary:

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racecar adorned with great tail-pipes like serpents with explosive breath, a roaring sports car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

While some of Mainetti’s points don’t sound too bad–for instance, that the poet “must spend himself with warmth, glamour, and prodigality to enhance the fervent urgency of the primordial elements”–the manifesto gets darker as it goes along. Article #9 declares, “We glorify war—the only true antidote for the world—and with it, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.” In article #10 we read, “We want to demolish museums and libraries, and oppose morality, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice.”

Recall that World War I is only five years in the future, followed immediately by Mussolini’s rise. Olear notes that Marinetti, “like his friend Ezra Pound, wound up being an apologist for autocracy and a tool of the totalitarian state.”

“Small wonder, he concludes, “the titans of Silicon Valley lined up behind Trump at the inauguration.”

Olear is careful to note that he is not against technological innovation and that science and religion don’t have to be yolked to an authoritarian agenda. For that matter, there can be anti-technocratic authoritarianism, as we see in Robert Kennedy’s war against vaccines, one of science’s greatest gifts to humanity. There were also Nazi environmentalists dreaming of pure nature. No less than accelerationism, extremist ideology, whether right or left, strips human beings of their humanity.

Novels like Frankenstein, by contrast, honor our humanity. Mary Shelley has given us a powerful forum to explore the moral, social, and political dimensions of our choices. In the light of such understanding, we stand a better chance of making wise decisions.

All gas and no braking, on the other hand, allows no room for reflection.

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The Song of Angry Americans

Still from Les Misérables

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Thursday

Kudos to Reuters News Service for its strategic juxtaposition, delivered deadpan, in an article on Trump’s plan to attend Les Misérables last night:

Trump’s appearance at Les Misérables, a show about citizens rising up against their government, comes just days after he sent U.S. Marines and the National Guard to quell protests against his administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles. First lady Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance will also attend.

Will the president connect “the songs of angry men” who vow to “not be slaves again” with the thousands of protesters who are expected to participate in the “No Kings” demonstrations this Saturday? Even in our rural and very red Tennessee county we will be assembling. In April we drew between 200-300 in our “Hands Off” protest (as in “Hands off our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid”) as we assembled across from the federal office building in Winchester, Tennessee, and I can imagine similar numbers this time around. I’ll report back on Monday.

“No Kings Day” organizers are very clear that the protests, in the spirit of Martin Luther King, must be peaceful—Trump is salivating over the prospect of military confrontation—so the passages from Victor Hugo’s novel don’t entirely fit. The Paris Revolution of 1832, which Hugo witnessed directly, was violent and was violently put down, with revolutionaries lined up and summarily shot when captured (as occurs in the novel). Still, the vision of insurrection leader Enjolras is one that Saturday’s protesters will be embracing as he speaks for democracies everywhere.

I’ve applied these passages in the past to the Ukrainians resisting Vladimir Putin and to freedom movements in Hong Kong, Myanmar, and elsewhere. (I’ve repurposed those posts here.) Little did I know that I would one day be applying them to an attempted fascist takeover in my own country. Here’s Enjolras:

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

Enjolras declares that the meaning of the struggle is self-determination or “sovereignty of myself over myself”:

Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.

Following a mini lecture on the social contract, Enjolras sets forth a Jeffersonian vision of the importance of education. Think of such education as a guard against the mendacity and brainwashing that the Trump White House and Fox News engage in daily:

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

Yes, light! light! everything comes from light!

To our sorrow, we know Enjolras’s next prediction will not occur. The 20th century, rather than being happy, will be one of the bloodiest in history. Nevertheless, the ideal he voices is one that activists have never ceased striving for. And to give Enjolras credit, from World War II up until now, the European Union and NATO have accomplished some of what he envisions while various minority rights movements have changed the landscape of civilized society (which of course is what so infuriates Trump and his supporters). Here’s Enjolras:

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

Another thing that Enjolras couldn’t foresee is that some people would become bored with freedom, choosing a leader who delights in taking it away once fears of invasion and famine had abated. Complacency set in as we forgot how precious and how fragile, democracy can be.

Enjolras’s address concludes with assurances that we need to hear. Whatever we sacrifice to protect freedom, he tells us, will not be in vain:

Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of Ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the Ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: ‘I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.’ From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

Americans have it lucky: on Saturday, people will not need to die to affirm our belief in our constitutional republic. The more of us who turn out, the more chance we have of saving the one we’ve got.

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