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Friday
Yesterday, while discussing Adrienne Rich’s poem “What Kinds of Times Are These,” I imagined her grappling with the question of how to speak to people about political danger. After a while, one begins tunning out the doomsayers, even when (or especially when) they’re right. Her answer is to speak to people indirectly through poetry. I imagine her saying, with Emily Dickinson, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”
The reason why literature instruction is so vital is that many of the great authors have anticipated the issues we’re dealing with now. Take Gulliver’s Travels, for instance. When I heard that ICE had sent an innocent man to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center based on an “administrative error”—and then complained that people were making a fuss over it—I thought of Gulliver complaining about the King of Brobdingnag’s “nice, unnecessary scruple” over gunpowder. Given that ICE officers are wielding such impressive power as they deport brown-skinned immigrants, I imagine Trump saying, why get hung up over the minor technicality that some of them have done nothing wrong?
I also thought of the line from Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove when General Buck Turgidson’s “infallible” human reliability test fails to screen out a mad general who sets off World War III. When criticized by the president, Turgidson replies, “Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”
But back to Gulliver, who when he is in the land of the giants provides insight into Trump. Because he is a small man (literally), he seeks to impress by talking big. Gulliver thinks he will win the giant king’s admiration with the secret of gunpowder. In this, he reminds me of the way that Trump, in his first administration, talked about using nuclear weapons and bunker busting bombs—or for that matter, the way that is currently flaunting American might and casually talking about going to war with Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Here’s Gulliver attempting to impress the Brobdingnagian king:
I told him of “an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. That a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near. That I knew the ingredients very well, which were cheap and common; I understood the manner of compounding them, and could direct his workmen how to make those tubes, of a size proportionable to all other things in his majesty’s kingdom, and the largest need not be above a hundred feet long; twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged with the proper quantity of powder and balls, would batter down the walls of the strongest town in his dominions in a few hours, or destroy the whole metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute commands.” This I humbly offered to his majesty, as a small tribute of acknowledgment, in turn for so many marks that I had received, of his royal favour and protection.
The king is as horrified as we should all be at Trump, and his reaction is one for the ages:
The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. “He was amazed, how so impotent and groveling an insect as I” (these were his expressions) “could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof,” he said, “some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom, than be privy to such a secret; which he commanded me, as I valued any life, never to mention any more.”
Impotent groveling insect unmoved at the prospect of blood and desolation? Yes, that’s our president. Unlike this enlightened king, Trump thinks that having absolute power over others should be every leader’s desire.
The Gulliver of Book II is an ardent patriot who thinks his country is the greatest. Under cross examination, however, the king carries away a picture that looks less like an idealized Great Britain and more like the Trump administration and his GOP enablers. Here’s his summation, which he figures out by reading between the lines of Gulliver’s praise:
My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom.
Based on this, the king concludes, “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
While I like to think that the rest of the world is distinguishing between Trumpists and other Americans, I shudder to think how we will be viewed if we’re not able to stop all the damage that he is inflicting. I predict we will see increasing numbers of Americans pretending they’re Canadian when traveling abroad.
