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Tuesday
With Donald Trump fantasizing himself as a king, it’s time (as I noted yesterday) to revisit some of our classic poems about the American Revolution. Longellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” has passages in it that, in light of recent developments, chill the blood.
Take, for instance, the spy work undertaken by Revere’s “friend” (probably Christ Church sexton Robert Newman). Instructed to figure out whether the British troops will come by land or by sea, he detects them heading for “their boats on the shore.” The muster of men has me thinking of what Trump is planning for the military once he strips it of responsible leadership and of military lawyers who would throw up legal “roadblocks” (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s term) to marching on American civilians:
Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.
We no longer need daring midnight rides to alert us to the threats that are coming. But we do need intrepid reporting, which we have not been getting from a mainstream media that failed to label Trump as the fascist threat he is proving to be. Our current versions of Newman and Revere and Samuel Dawes (who rode with Newman that night) are increasingly proving to be those independent outlets not in thrall to billionaire owners.
In the poem, Longfellow talks about how “the fate of a nation was riding that night” and how the spark struck out by the galloping horse “kindled the land into flame with its heat.”
It appears that, thanks to such organizations as Meidas and various substack newsletters, the kindling is beginning. Angry voices, many in deeply red Congressional districts, have been besieging their members of Congress in town meetings. We are increasingly seeing large demonstrations, and lawyers have been attacking Trump and Elon Musk’s executive orders every chance they get. It remains to be seen how effective this all proves to be but it is making an effort.
The lesson that Longfellow draws from Revere’s ride is that we will always be in need of such wake-up calls. “Throughout all our history,” he declares, we will need the night rider’s “cry of defiance, and not of fear”:
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
It so happens that Longfellow wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1860 to awaken America to the danger of civil war, the poem being written less than a year before before confederate soldiers would fire upon Fort Sumpter. We are in our “hour of darkness and peril and need.” The poem, which I used to regard as one of those sing-songy affairs trafficking in patriotic platitudes, now speaks with a fierce urgency.
The great German cultural observer Walter Benjamin describes this transition to relevancy. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he writes about moments when the past becomes “charged with the time of the now” and is “blasted out of the continuum of history.” It is as though time falls away and we reach through history to “seize hold of a memory.” The American Revolution did this with the Roman republic (which is one reason why there’s a statue of George Washington wearing a toga), and we may be starting to do this with our own Revolution, as our current president tweets out an image of himself wearing a crown.
In other words, ask not for whom the rider rides. He rides for thee.
