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Wednesday
As I note in my book Better Living through Literature, allusions to great works can deepen the national conversations we have about important issues. I came across a couple of good examples this past week, one from Shakespeare, one from Henry James.
First of all, there was political commentator Jay Kuo applying an image from Macbeth to urge the Democrats to stay strong against the Trump administration as it trashes the Constitution. The minority party is filibustering a bill to keep funding the government, their aim being to persuade the GOP to reverse the ruinous July healthcare cuts. If allowed to go into effect, these cuts will lead to rural hospital closures and millions of Americans losing their insurance.
Kuo explains why the Democrats should stick to their guns—or, as we’ll see in a moment, to their crossbows:
For our own sanity, and to win elections going forward, we need to begin to let the chips fall where they may with the Trump economy and GOP budget. If that means a government shutdown and even mass firings of federal workers (which is happening anyway even without a shutdown), then we need to make peace with that. Even if it means acceleration of Project 2025, it’s time for the Christian Nationalists to show their true agenda more plainly for the electorate to see and experience. If we are going to face it all anyway, we might as well force their hand now before even more of our remaining guardrails are gone.
Now for the quote from Macbeth:
When we screw our courage to the sticking point, and we hold fast to the truth that the only way out is through, we will also discover what we have sorely lacked till now: a true fighting spirit. We need deep clarity of purpose in our resistance to the fascist takeover. We cannot blink, we cannot falter, we cannot capitulate.
“Screwing our courage” is an image taken from crossbows: when they are wound up to the limit, it’s time to fire. Lady Macbeth resorts to the image when she sees her husband beginning to get cold feet over killing his king, who at the time is a guest in his house. When you floated this idea initially to me, she angrily points out, you were a real man, but now you’re worried whether now is the right time and place for to show it:
What beast was’t, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both.
They have made themselves, and that, their fitness, now
Does unmake you.
Then she demonstrates, in one of Shakespeare’s most memorable and terrifying images, what real commitment looks like:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out had I so sworn
as you have done to this.
In her subsequent pep talk, she uses the phrase quoted by Kuo:
Macbeth: If we should fail—
Lady Macbeth We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking place
And we’ll not fail.
It may be unsettling to think of the Democrats using the Macbeths as a model, especially as many more babies die as a result of Republican measures than Democratic. But in truth, the Democrats have been behaving a lot like King Duncan in recent years, blindly trusting that, in the end, Republicans would act in good faith. As the president increasingly resorts to fascist tactics–and as the Supreme Court increasingly gives him the power to renege on any negotiated Congressional spending agreements–they must use whatever limited power they have left to the fullest. As Kamala Harris recently put it, they must “fight fire with fire.”
While it’s true that Trump and the GOP has considerably more fire power than the Democrats, when the choice is to fight or die, the decision is fairly easy. If Duncan had foreseen what was coming, he would not have gone to sleep that night.
The other literary allusion appeared in an Atlantic by Tom Nichols, former professor at the U.S. Naval War College. Searching for reasons why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would bring 800 military leaders and generals together for an in-person meeting in Virginia, Nichols turned to James’s Turn of the Screw for the most plausible explanation.
First, here’s Nichols criticizing the idea:
Hegseth has had a lot of bad ideas, but this one is disruptive and even somewhat dangerous. All of these men and women have real jobs they should be doing. Even if Hegseth is calling this meeting to discuss serious issues of national defense—and so far, the Pentagon has given no such indications—few things are important enough to justify the security risk of putting the entire top U.S. military command, the secretary of defense, and the president all in the same room.
Miles, the seemingly angelic boy in James’s ghost story, disturbs his governess by going outside at night. We’re never sure why—is it to commune with the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessup, the former gamekeeper and governess?—but the governess can’t bring herself to directly confront him about this act of disobedience. In an elliptical and frustrating interchange with Miles, they get to talking about why he behaves as he does:
“And you can’t say I’ve not been awfully good, can you?”
I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t say that, Miles.”
“Except just that one night, you know—!”
“That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he.
“Why, when I went down—went out of the house.”
“Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.”
“You forget?”—he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. “Why, it was to show you I could!”
“Oh, yes, you could.”
“And I can again.”
Here’s Nichols:
In the end, I suspect that Hegseth is trying to bolster his stature by flexing his bureaucratic muscles. He’s disrupting the work and daily life of hundreds of people to emphasize that he has the power to do so. Like Trump himself, Hegseth seems to feel the need to do things that others think are unwise as a way of demonstrating toughness and independence. Both men remind me of Miles, the creepy child in the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw. When Miles misbehaves, his governess asks him why he would do such a thing. “Why, it was to show you I could!” he says. “And I can again.”
For those who know the book, Nichols’s use of the episode captures just how spine-chilling this moment was, made all the more so by Trump ruminating about using American cities as training grounds for the military and national guard.
Well, we’ve been shown that the president and his secretary could. Which for them, if not for Miles, is the point.
