Thursday
My heart leaped when I saw a political pundit referencing both Samuel Johnson and John Milton to describe Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. For the record, my graduate school field was Restoration and 18th century British Literature, which is to say, from when Milton wrote Paradise Lost to when Jane Austen composed the first draft of Pride and Prejudice. Then another commentator mentioned Voltaire and my joy was complete.
First, here’s the Bulwark’s Bill Kristol:
My reaction to Trump’s speech mirrored Samuel Johnson’s famous (but probably unfair?) judgment of Milton’s Paradise Lost: “None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.”
My students, when assigned Paradise Lost, have sometimes understood Johnson to be saying that Milton’s epic is too damn long, which, while true of Trump’s speech, isn’t exactly what Johnson was saying. In fact, Johnson was a fan of the poem and would routinely quote passages from it. But where Paradise Lost does run on—I’m thinking of the second half of Book XI and the first half of Book XII—it bears some resemblance to Trump’s “American carnage” emphasis.
God has sent the archangel Michael down to inform Adam and Eve that they will (1) soon be leaving the Garden of Eden and (2) eventually die. He also delivers a history lesson about what will happen over the next several thousand years, most of it bad. First there’s all the evil leading up to Noah’s flood, then all the evil necessitating Christ having to intervene, and then all the ways in which the church founded by Christ’s followers will become corrupted. The account competes with Trump’s version of America when the Democrats are in charge.
But the archangel hasn’t come down only to deliver bad news. Just as Trump in his speech predicted that “soon you will see numbers that few people would think it possible to achieve just a short time ago” and that American will be back “bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before,” so Michael assures Adam that Jesus will come a second time to make everything right:
Thy Saviour and thy Lord,
Last in the clouds from heav’n [will] be revealed
In glory of the Father, to dissolve
Satan with his perverted World, then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date
Founded in righteousness and peace and love
To bring forth fruits joy and eternal bliss.
In Adam’s eyes, this makes all the suffering worth it:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Then that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness!
Now, I know there are white nationalist Christians who see Trump in apocalyptic terms—I wrote recently how some applaud him as a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem—so perhaps they appreciated his mixture of doom speak and boasting. If so, however, they might note that Trump is conspicuously deficient in the behaviors that Michael demands of Adam, starting with good deeds:
[O]nly add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,
By name to come called charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.
Unfortunately, Trump more resembles those kings described by the archangel who succeeded David and Solomon, which is to say kings who led a great nation into depravity so that it was eventually conquered by the Babylonians. Michael talks of how their
foul idolatries, and other faults
Heaped to the popular sum, will so incense
God, as to leave them, and expose their land,
Their city, his temple, and his holy ark
With all his sacred things, a scorn and prey
To that proud city [Babylon], whose high Walls thou saw’st
Left in confusion…
Think of our holy ark as the Constitution. Other nations may not have the power to drag us off to Babylon, but why bother when Trump & Co. are locking up innocent people here at home.
The other 18th century reference I encountered was to Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism and to Candide’s tutor Pangloss, a satiric caricature of the great German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz. Even as everything around him is going to hell, Pangloss stubbornly contends that “we live in the best of all possible worlds.” Observing that Trump’s default setting is triumphalism, the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser noted his “Panglossian conviction that a country with him as its leader must be doing pretty damn great.”
At one stretch in Candide, the world challenges Pangloss’s optimism. He is first condemned to be burned at the stake, then (because it’s raining) imperfectly hanged, then partially cut open by a doctor before coming back to life, and then condemned to life as a galley slave, where he is repeatedly whipped, before Candide rescues him. Arguing with Pangloss that we may not live in the best of all possible worlds, however, is like arguing with fervent Trump supporters that their idol may not be the perfect blend of Christ, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln:
Well, my dear Pangloss,” said Candide to him, “when you had been hanged, dissected, whipped, and were tugging at the oar, did you always think that everything happens for the best?”
“I am still of my first opinion,” answered Pangloss, “for I am a philosopher and I cannot retract, especially as Leibnitz could never be wrong; and besides, the pre-established harmony is the finest thing in the world…
Epstein and Trump may have been molesting young girls, but, hey, the Dow is over 50,000!
