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Tuesday
With Donald Trump now a convicted felon, certain parties are calling upon President Biden to pardon him. Greg Olear, a novelist and political writer who blogs at the substack Prevail, thinks this is a terrible idea and cites Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and a Czeslaw Milosz poem to explain why.
In Shakespeare’s play Portia, attempting to persuade Shylock to withdraw his “pound of flesh” agreement, delivers one of literature’s most powerful speeches on behalf of mercy. Mercy, she asserts, is a divine or holy power:
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
The problem with pardoning Trump, Olear points out, is that the power of pardoning is
not be used willy-nilly. Indiscriminate mercy is not mercy at all, because true mercy requires reciprocity. [Portia’s] speech begins and ends with this “both sides” idea. Mercy is a two-way street. It blesses “him that gives and him that takes.” And in praying that mercy be granted to ourselves, we learn to grant mercy to those who trespass against us.
It’s stating the obvious to say that this is not how Trump sees pardoning. Indeed, Olear say that Trump’s practice of pardoning political allies was one of the most outrageous things that he did as president. He himself
is incapable of mercy, and that makes him unworthy of mercy. There was no divinity within him when he signed off on the pardons for Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. He is a transactional creature—temporal, devoid of wisdom and refinement. He is…the man who commits a crime and should know better.
Trump has, Olear says, desecrated presidential pardoning power, draining it of its higher meaning.
Instead of being guided by lopsided demands that he pardon Trump, therefore, Olear says that Biden should be guided by Truth and Justice, two concepts celebrated in Milosz’s poem “Incantation.” The Polish poet, who helped Jews escape the Nazis during World War II and then defected from communist Poland to the West, declares that poetry and Philo-Sophia (love of wisdom) will go undefeated. Olear believes that Milosz is deliberately echoing Portia’s speech:
Incantation
By Czeslaw Milosz
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
So will “lie and oppression” indeed deliver themselves to destruction. If so, it won’t happen soon. Despite the fact that Trump is now a convicted felon, his supporters are more ardent than ever. In fact, they have now taken up Trump’s drumbeat that the judicial system is rigged, just as most are claiming that the 2020 election was rigged. Rationalizing away their cult leader’s behavior, they engage in “the filthy discord of tortured words,” a powerful way to describe how they contort reason and corrupt language.
If the idea of poetry and Philo-Sophia joining forces to usher in a new order seems fanciful, recall that the poet witnessed first-hand both the Holocaust and Stalinism. He saw graphic instances of bars, barbed wire, and the pulping of books. In other words, he’s no starry-eyed idealist. Perhaps, by calling his poem “incantation,” he is imagining that words of truth can bring about positive change. As Martin Luther King, echoing Jesus, put it, “I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
The power of literature to speak truth to power is a point that Indian novelist Salman Rushdie has made in an article about why we should continue to read the classics. Meanwhile Milosz sounds, in the last line, as though he’s channeling the Biblical psalms or the prophecies of Isaiah.
By observing that news of this new dispensation has been brought by “a unicorn and an echo,” Milosz acknowledges that the victory he longs for will require stepping beyond normal reality and heeding distant words. Yet he’s right that human reason Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope, that it doesn’t distinguish “Jew from Greek or slave from master.” Human reason is beautiful and invincible in the same sense that (against quoting King) the long arc of history bends toward justice. “No sentence of banishment can prevail against it,” says the man who was forced to flee Stalinist Poland.
If Portia’s mercy or Milosz’s human reason could soften Trump’s heart or open his mind, then maybe discussion of a pardon would not be out of bounds (although Biden, not being the New York governor, couldn’t usher one in the Manhattan case). But, like one of Dante’s damned souls, Trump is impervious to anything that “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” Truth and Justice are all we have to combat him with.
