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Sunday
This past week Mariann Budde, who was my diocesan bishop when I lived and worked in southern Maryland, called upon to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” Among these were LGBTQ+ children, immigrant laborers, and refugees fleeing oppression. It was very much in the spirit of Jesus when, returning to Nazareth, he spoke before the synagogue in which he had grown up (today’s Gospel lesson). And just as Jesus was roundly attacked and almost thrown off a cliff, so was the bishop roundly attacked by Trump and his supporters, including so-called Christian Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House. Trump’s Christian supporters seem to have no problem beating up on the poor.
At the end of today’s post I include a poem by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, a practitioner of liberation theology who draws on the psalms just as Jesus did.
First, here’s what Jesus had to say in today’s Gospel:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
And now Budde:
Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen”
And finally Cardenal’s poem, translated by Jonathan Cohen. If you know the psalms, you will see it as written very much in that tradition:
Give Ear to My Words, Psalm 5
Give ear to my words O Lord Hear my groans Listen to my protest For you are not a God who is a friend of dictators nor a supporter of their politics nor are you influenced by their propaganda nor do you associate with any gangster
There’s no honesty in their speeches nor in their press releases
They talk of peace in their speeches while they increase their war production
They talk of peace at Peace Conferences and secretly prepare for war Their lying radios blare all night long
Their desks are piled with criminal plans and sinister documents
But you will protect me from their plans
They speak through the mouth of machine guns Their flashing tongues are bayonets…
Punish them O God foil their politics mix up their memos block their programs
At the hour of the Alarm Siren you will be with me you will be my refuge on the day of the Bomb
You bless the righteous who don’t believe in the lies of their ads nor in their publicity and political campaigns
Your love surrounds them like armored tanks
It’s worth noting that, while Cardenal’s radical Christianity drew the fire of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza so that he had to flee to Costa Rica, it also angered the Marxist government that overthrew Somoza. His funeral in 2020 was disrupted by pro-Daniel Ortega supporters and he had to be buried in secret.
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Friday
A recent Literary Hub article on Ursula Le Guin’s activism grapples with how to respond to Trumpism’s recent victory, with Julie Phillips looking back over the author’s life and works for anything useful.
Phillips begins with Le Guin’s response to Trump’s first victory in 2016. “Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred,” Le Guin observed, and her fear was that liberals like her would fall into a vicious circle of action and reaction. It’s something that happens in The World for Word Is Forest, where the peaceful Athsheans live in accord with nature until aggressive earthlings invade them in a search for natural resources. Although they manage to repel the invaders, they are tainted by the experience, learning that it is possible to kill without reason.
As she processed Trump’s victory, Le Guin wrote that she was looking “for a place to stand, or a way to go, where the behavior of those I oppose will not control my behavior.” In her case, she turned to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, advocating his “paradoxical ideal” of “doing without doing”:
[S]he advised standing firm, “refusing to engage an aggressor on his own terms.” Instead of fighting back, she counseled patience, compassion, and courage. “Defending a cause without fighting, without attacking, without aggression,” she argued, “is an action. It is an expression of power. It takes control.”
For a concrete example, she turned to water, which
gives way to anything harder than itself, offers no resistance, flows around obstacles, accepts whatever comes to it,…yet continues to be itself and to go always in the direction it must go. The tides of the oceans obey the moon while the great currents of the open sea keep on their ways beneath. Water remains itself and pursues its course, flowing down and on, above ground or underground, breathing itself out into the air in evaporation, rising in mist, fog, cloud, returning to earth as rain, refilling the sea. Water doesn’t have only one way. It has infinite ways, it takes whatever way it can, it is utterly opportunistic, and all life on earth depends on this passive, yielding, uncertain, adaptable, changeable element.
Phillips acknowledges herself somewhat frustrated by this response—it’s too vague and mystical for her—so she turns to how Le Guin actually lived her beliefs, along with what her fiction reveals. In The Dispossessed, for instance, she describes an anarchist community that has turned its back on capitalism and found another way to live. To reread The Dispossessed during the closing days of the 2024 election, Philips says,
was to take a restful vacation from billionaire oligarchs and election stress. On Anarres there are no politicians, no bosses, no wages, no police, “no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals” and “no government but the single principle of free association.” Its goals aren’t in the future—what we can achieve someday, when we run the perfect campaign or elect the perfect candidates—but in the process itself. Its people practice a politics of means, not ends.
While the Anarresti have only one word for “work” and “play,” Phillips notes, they do have a special word for drudgery (kleggich), which involves “the necessary tasks that keep households and societies running.” Le Guin, she points out, devoted much of her life to “small actions to support her city and its communities.” She also participated in various elections, stuffing envelopes and writing newsletters for Eugene McCarthy (in 1968) and, over the years, giving benefit reading “for bookstores, writers’ retreats, a women’s shelter, against hunger, censorship, AIDS.”
The idea of small actions making a difference is embraced in her well-known short story “The Ones Who Talk Away from Omelas,” a parable where certain citizens choose to walk away from their utopian society because this society can only exist if a child is mistreated. The parable applies to any society that exploits a few for the benefit of the many.
Phillips reports that Le Guin originally considered having people come in and save the child, even though in doing so they would render the rest of society unhappy. It’s noteworthy that, in her final version as in Dispossessed, she has people leave rather than strive to rectify the injustice.
While this may sound escapist, there’s something important that Le Guin is doing, which is using her fiction to imagine other possibilities for society. In my book Better Living through Literature I talk about how Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson praises Le Guin and certain other science fiction authors for this imagining:
Jameson [believes] that, if we have difficulty imagining a better world, it is “not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.” In other words, those in power limit our very ability to imagine….
In his writing Jameson contends that utopian science fiction such as Dispossessed, Joanna Russ’s Female Man, Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time, and Samuel Delany’s Triton can counter this closure. He writes that their “deepest vocation is to bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional ability to imagine Utopia itself.”
In other words, by immersing ourselves in literary sci-fi, we begin chipping away at the impediments to imagining, thereby creating a space for radical aspiration. It’s a way of keeping our hope muscles from atrophying.
In her Literary Hub article, Phillips writes about a 1982 interview by a science fiction magazine where Le Guin was asked what she would do to save the world. She impatiently replied,
The syntax implies a further clause beginning with if…What would I do to save the world if I were omnipotent? But I am not, so the question is trivial. What would I do to save the world if I were a middle-aged middle-class woman? Write novels and worry.
To which Phillips adds, “If ‘worry’ can be translated as ‘care,’ then she combined her vision for the future with tending to what is worthy of care in the here and now.”
In short, Le Guin maintains a healthy balance between tending to local projects “while still writing and listening to the voices of writers who ‘can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society … to other ways of being.’”
A novelist may not be able to tell us exactly what to do in the fact of a Donald Trump–Le Guin in fact shies aways from being didactic in her novels–but he or she\ helps prevent us from succumbing to his version of the world. While the fascist mentality seeks to limit what we see as possible, works like Dispossessed and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” expand our horizons.
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Thursday
I’m repurposing a post I wrote this past November on Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2016) because it has become relevant in a new way. The novel, which I was teaching in a Postcolonial Literature class in Slovenia, has an episode featuring former African American tennis player Bryan Shelton. In recent news, Shelton’s son Ben has just been involved in a minor dust-up at the Australian Open after reaching the semi-finals.
Following his quarterfinal win over France’s Gael Monfils, Ben launched into the media, complaining, “I’ve been a little bit shocked this week with how players have been treated by the broadcasters.” After providing several examples, including a reporter who reportedly said, “Hey, Ben, how does it feel that no matter who you play in your next match, no one is going to be cheering for you?” Shelton concluded,
I mean, may be true, but I just don’t think the comment is respectful from a guy I’ve never met before in my life. I feel like broadcasters should be helping us grow our sport and help these athletes who just won matches on the biggest stage enjoy one of their biggest moments. I feel like there’s just been a lot of negativity. I think that’s something that needs to change.”
Although Shelton’s father Bryan also gets no respect from the owner of a London pizza parlor in Zadie Smith’s novel, the staff are definitely cheering for him. In an episode featuring Shelton’s fourth-round run in the 1994 Wimbledon tournament, Smith shows how new alliances spring up in our globalized world. Those cheering include immigrants from Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia, along with narrator Fern, who is the daughter of an English father and an Afro-Jamaican mother.
That they are cheering is no surprise. Although we have become accustomed to players of color since the Williams sisters, Bryan Shelton was one of the very Black players in 1994 and was the first African American to win an ATP event since Arthur Ashe did so in 1978.
In the novel, the pizza parlor is run by Bahran, an Iranian who longs to belong to the privileged Anglo demographic. For instance, Bahran claims that polo is his favorite sport, causing his staff to explode with laughter. Fern observes in him
a flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating.
Thinking at first that Fern is Persian because of her nose, Bahran is solicitous and complimentary. When he discovers her mother is from Jamaica, however, he turns on her, telling her that her people “don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth.”
Because she needs the money, however, Fern tells the reader she “couldn’t afford to be offended.”
Tensions are turned up a notch when the restaurant television begins showing Bryan Shelton’s Wimbledon matches. Fern reports,
As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton had never heard of him really before [Somalian] Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I brought little American flags to work on the days of his games…Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries…all slip away until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.
It all comes to a head when Shelton, in the third round, comes up Karim Alami, an Arab player from Morocco. The atmosphere in the pizza parlor becomes electric:
Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house—and therefore the television—by the time the game began.
Throughout the match, Bahram chain-smokes Gauloises cigarettes and offers a running commentary that “had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults.” This includes delineating the differences between Arabs and those from Sub-Saharan Africa:
The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.
“But,” Fern reports,
he was not lost: he took the set seven-five and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner—whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask—and made her dance with him, to some highlife he had going on the transiter radio he carried everywhere.
The euphoria does not last, however, as Shelton loses the next set 6-1, leading to a Bahran attack on Black Africans in general. “Wherever you go in world,” he tells Anwar, “you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan—depends. But your people aways lose.”
Meanwhile, with the score 2-1 sets in favor of Shelton, the game goes into a fourth set, at which point
we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players—in truth almost perfectly matched—battling towards an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, five-seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.
And then, in a passage that my Slovenians and one Macedonian appreciated as it features a former countryman from the Yugoslav days,
“But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall.
When Shelton wins the fifth and deciding set, the reaction is electric:
Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling—I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out.
He then, however, figures out a way to salvage some self-respect. Recall that, up to this point, he has been unloading on Shelton and his employees for their African heritage. Now he plays the one card he has left. Showing Fern a photo of Shelton as she is taking phone orders, he says,
“Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.” “I’m working.” “Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.” I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled. “Half-winner,” he said. I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.
Bryan Shelton, in other words, is Black until it serves a racist agenda to categorize him as White. Bahram would be sure to make this point even more emphatically in the case of Bryan’s mixed-race son Ben, whose skin is lighter than his father’s.
These passages get at the heart of Smith’s vision, which is that citizens from the former colonies are transforming the motherland, turning it into a vibrant but bewildering new entity in which traditional distinctions are overwhelmed and new lines are drawn.
Of course, this is also leading to the rise of rightwing nationalism in many nations, along with immigrants who—like the Iranian Bahran—dream of joining those in power. Throughout American history we have seen various groups seeking to join the upper echelons of our caste system and become “White,” including the Irish, the Scots, the southern Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, and so on. Such longing may have played a deciding role in the 2024 election as it appears that certain Latinos, in spite of Donald Trump depicting them as “rapists and murders,” were willing to vote for him. Trump also drew more support than expected from South and East Asians. How many Bahrams do we have, one wonders–-which is to say, how many are willing to denigrate the descendants of Black Africa in order to become acceptable to White America? What are they willing to sell out to achieve acceptance?
For their part, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, despite being mixed race, did not choose to become Black, despite Trump’s claims. America’s caste system is such that they were inevitably “cast” into that identity. To their credit, they embraced it and became inspirational figures. But race continues to be a major force—maybe the major force—in American political life.
Which is why Postcolonial Literature classes such as the one I was teaching in Slovenia are so vital. The entire world is experiencing cultural explosions like those described by Smith, and writers everywhere are exploring them. Teaching this class, which was made up of straight-up Slovenians, hyphenated Slovenians (Serbian-Slovenian, Sudanian-Slovenian), and Erasmus students from Germany, Belgium, Macedonia, and Turkey, made this clearer than ever to me.
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Wednesday
My faculty reading group has just finished discussing the Odyssey, and the voice of Odysseus confronting the suitors is still ringing in my ears. His words could easily be directed towards Donald Trump.
The suitors violate one of the most sacred tenets of ancient Greek society. Like Paris in The Iliad, who abducts his host’s wife and triggers the Trojan War, they abuse the laws of hospitality. Meanwhile Trump and the rest of their crew are determined to violate the Constitution, the rule of law, and America’s expressed commitment (in The Declaration of Independence) to equity and fairness. Among the president’s most egregious actions on his first day was
–pardoning all those who invaded the Capitol and assaulted police on January 6; –decreeing an end to birthright citizenship; –halting refugee resettlement, including Afghans who supported us in the war there.
Trump is also withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organizing, thereby relinquishing American leadership in addressing the most pressing problems facing the world. Joe Biden made important steps in fighting climate change, which is pounding us all, and the United States played a key role in stopping or limiting Ebola and Covid. These threats won’t go away just because Trump decides to ignore them.
We can add to these measures Trump’s determination to turn that United States into Trump, Inc. From crypto to Trump-endorsed products to naked bribery, he’s willing to listen to anyone who directs cash his way. It’s difficult to imagine anything more sordid.
In Book XXII of Homer’s epic, Odysseus, who has returned to his house disguised as a beggar, is appalled at the desecration he witnesses. After first shaming the suitors by being the only man in the room who can bend his great bow, he throws off his beggar’s cloak and reveals himself with the following speech:
You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder, twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared bid for my wife while I was still alive. Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven, contempt for what men say of you hereafter. Your last hour has come. You die in blood.
America was founded upon certain Enlightenment ideals, and while we haven’t always lived up to them (as any number of minority groups can testify), they have been at the foundation of our greatness as a nation. This administration feels nothing but contempt for these ideals and for what people will say of it hereafter.
We have other ways of settling conflict than bloodshed and there’s no one person that can stride in and restore us. But a reckoning is coming, in one form or another.
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Tuesday
Here’s a new literary allusion to add to our political lexicon. People who enable narcissists, such as the one we just put in the White House, are being called “flying monkeys.”
According to Adam England in a VeryWellMind article, flying monkeys are people “who carry out the work of a narcissist or an abusive person.” Narcissists will use these monkeys, England explains, “as spies, or to spread rumors, making them act as substitutes for themselves.”
The reference, of course, is to The Wizard of Oz—or maybe now, to Wicked.
Licensed clinical psychologist Lauren Kerwin notes that it’s often difficult to recognize a flying monkey “as they may seem like normal people who are simply taking sides in a disagreement or conflict.” She provides the following list of tell-tale signs:
–They side with the narcissist no matter the situation or evidence presented to them; –They spread gossip or rumors about you; –They gaslight or manipulate you; –They dismiss or trivialize your feelings; –They pass on information about you to help the narcissist harass you.
In L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, one finds more than a few resemblances between the flying monkeys and Trump’s ardent supporters. In the case of these supporters, they were initially drawn in because they found Trump entertaining—they reveled in how he insulted groups they didn’t like—but in the process they got pulled into something darker. Like storming the Capitol, for instance.
We learn from the head monkey that the monkeys too started out as fairly harmless pranksters. He tells Dorothy how they insulted Quelala, fiancé of the beautiful princess Gayelette:
My grandfather was at that time the King of the Winged Monkeys which lived in the forest near Gayelette’s palace, and the old fellow loved a joke better than a good dinner. One day, just before the wedding, my grandfather was flying out with his band when he saw Quelala walking beside the river. He was dressed in a rich costume of pink silk and purple velvet, and my grandfather thought he would see what he could do. At his word the band flew down and seized Quelala, carried him in their arms until they were over the middle of the river, and then dropped him into the water.
“‘Swim out, my fine fellow,’ cried my grandfather, ‘and see if the water has spotted your clothes.’”
No ultimate harm is done, but while Quelala laughs the incident off, Gayelette is less forgiving:
The princess was angry, and she knew, of course, who did it. She had all the Winged Monkeys brought before her, and she said at first that their wings should be tied and they should be treated as they had treated Quelala, and dropped in the river. But my grandfather pleaded hard, for he knew the Monkeys would drown in the river with their wings tied, and Quelala said a kind word for them also; so that Gayelette finally spared them, on condition that the Winged Monkeys should ever after do three times the bidding of the owner of the Golden Cap. This Cap had been made for a wedding present to Quelala, and it is said to have cost the princess half her kingdom.
Think of this as an FAFO moment (F–k around and find out), which many are predicting for those who voted for Trump.
Quelala makes minimal use of the cap—he tells the monkeys to stay out of Gayelette’s sight, “which we were glad to do”—but the wedding gift becomes far more dangerous when the Wicked Witch of the West gets hold of it.
If we see the transition in ownership from Quelala to the Witch as Trump’s transition from entertainer to fascist, then what begins as a joke turns lethal. The Witch uses the monkeys to enslave the Winkies, drive Oz out of the Land of the West, and capture or destroy Dorothy and her friends. For his part, Trump, as stochastic terrorist, has been inciting certain of his followers to violence, and he now appears prepared to trigger punitive deportations and to weaponize the Department of Justice against his enemies. If he gets a compliant Secretary of Defense, maybe he’ll even order the military to shoot protesters in the legs.
The Witch too incites violence:
Some of the Monkeys seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.
Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.
The remaining Monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the Lion and wound many coils about his body and head and legs, until he was unable to bite or scratch or struggle in any way.
We can think of the Golden Cap as the red MAGA cap, holding our own winged monkeys in thrall. Pray that our drama ends as Baum’s novel does, with the powers of the cap getting used up and the monkeys returning to their harmless play in the jungle. Until that happens, however, we—like the Winkies, Dorothy, and all who run afoul of our own Wicked Witch—are in peril.
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Monday – Martin Luther King Day
I will be far from the only one noting the terrible irony of a white supremacist being sworn in as president on Martin Luther King’s birthday. For me, however, there’s one silver lining, which I’ve had to do some deep internal diving to discover.
That silver lining comes in the form of increased understanding. The frustration I have felt watching Donald Trump escape accountability time after time—and seeing him be reelected even after staging a coup—would not have been unfamiliar to King. But it is new to me.
Why have I been blind? Well, my privileged white background has allowed me to think that the rule of law applies in the United States. People of color in this country, by contrast, have had no such illusions, and they have been trying to awaken me for years through literature. Which is to say, through the poetry of Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde; through the fiction of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison; through the plays of August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Imamu Baraka; and many, many others. Their shouting has finally managed to penetrate.
To be fully human, it is important for me to see this reality. But there’s something even more at stake for me. I have five grandchildren of color—one Asian, four Afro-Caribbean—and if I am to support them as fully as I want to, I must understand what they will be going through. My sons and daughters-in-law, in ways that are age appropriate, are doing all they can to alert them to the reality they will be facing. But it will not be easy.
I’ve had one professional relationship with a noted poet of color who tried to awaken me to her reality. For years I was fortunate to have Lucille Clifton as a colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I admired her immensely and taught her poetry in my classes, but occasionally I was aware of her frustrations with me. I’ve written about a poem in which she had me in mind (I know because I asked her and she confirmed it). In “note to self,” starting off with a Baraka quote (“I refuse to be judged by white men”), she writes
or defined. and i see that even the best believe they have that right, believe that what they say i mean is what i mean as if words only matter in the world they know, as if when i choose words i must choose those that they can live with
She follows up by noting that she has been called on to deal with racism experienced by our students of color that their white professors were blind to:
as if i have not reached across our history to touch, to soothe on more than one occasion
Now, when Lucille compiled a collection of her poems, she chose not to include this one. Perhaps she feared it was too personal a complaint. (It of course appears in the complete collection of her poems put together after her death.) I, however, made a point to always teach “note to self” in my Intro to Literature classes, talking about my own learning curve.
But whatever progress I made, it took the helplessness I have felt in the Trump era to make the next step. So this is what it feels not to have power. The realization is making me a better grandfather.
Martin Luther King is inspirational in the way that he refused to give up, even in the face of tremendous odds and heartbreaking reversals. We can use this quirk in the calendar as a symbolic reminder that he wouldn’t have given up in the face of Trump’s reelection. As the gospel hymn-turned-protest song puts it,
We are soldiers in the army. We have to fight although we have to cry. We’ve got to hold up the bloodstained banner. We’ve got to hold it up until we die!
My mother was a soldier. She had her hand on the gospel plow. But one day she got old; couldn’t fight anymore. She said, “I’ll stand here and fight anyhow.”
I conclude today’s post with a poem of Lucille’s that I have always admired. She often liked to say that her job as a poet was “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,” so here’s a case of her doing the latter:
whose side are you on? By Lucille Clifton
the side of the busstop woman trying to drag her bag up the front steps before the doors clang shut i am on her side i give her exact change and him the old man hanging by one strap his work hand folded shut as the bus doors i am on his side when he needs to leave i ring the bell i am on their side riding the late bus into the same someplace i am on the dark side always the side of my daughters the side of my tired sons
I am on the side of my granddaughters and my grandsons, and I am willing to undergo any education I still need to be the support they need.
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Sunday
My friend Rebecca Adams alerted me to a Diane Butler Bass essay about celestial fire that shares two powerful fire poems. Bass observes that, with the California fires raging, it can be unsettling to encounter John the Baptist’s prediction for Jesus: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” As Bass observes, fire “is a horror of torture and destruction, apocalypse and hell. We know the spiritual implications. We’ve seen the pictures. Perhaps we’ve even experienced the threat or the flames.”
But then she notes that fire
is something else as well — it burns off the chaff of delusion, falsity, and self-hatred. With this fiery baptism three things are revealed: the true self, the central meaning of existence, and a holy welcome. Identity, love, and acceptance.
In her essay, Bass notes that our first impulse, when confronted with fire, is to run towards it. She notes that “every person I knew in New York City on 9/11 ran toward the Twin Towers to help.” The same has been true with the California fires:
There was a man who attempted to save his entire block with a garden hose. Neighbors who rescued pets. A few people who watered down their houses in order to protect not only their property but an entire neighborhood behind their homes. A friend of mine whose house in Malibu burned mourned not for her loss but for the losses of her neighbors. And still others I know, evacuated from their own homes, occupied themselves by feeding, serving, and comforting other evacuees. Yes, they fled. But not before helping — and not before thinking about and trying to do something for their relatives, friends, neighbors, and even strangers.
“Fire is like that,” she writes. “Before running away, we often run toward.” Her two poems are both about running towards.
First, there’s David Whyte’s “Fire in the Earth,” about Moses walking towards the burning bush. Whyte compares it to losing one’s house in a fire, which far too many people can relate to these days, whether in California or Gaza. What seems like the end, however, Whyte describes as a beginning. Your old life must burn away if you are to embrace your life’s mission:
Like the moment you too saw, for the first time, your own house turned to ashes. Everything consumed so the road could open again.
At such moments, one becomes a living flame:
Your entire presence in your eyes and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame.
Here’s the poem:
Fire in the Earth By David Whyte
And we know, when Moses was told, in the way he was told, “Take off your shoes!” He grew pale from that simple
reminder of fire in the dusty earth. He never recovered his complicated way of loving again
and was free to love in the same way he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him. As if the lion earth could roar
and take him in one movement. Every step he took from there was carefully placed.
Everything he said mattered as if he knew the constant witness of the ground and remembered his own face in the dust
the moment before revelation. Since then thousands have felt the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.
Like the moment you too saw, for the first time, your own house turned to ashes. Everything consumed so the road could open again.
Your entire presence in your eyes and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame.
The other poem, by Mary Oliver, has to do with erotic passion. When one falls in love, does one play it safe or walk directly into the danger?
The speaker sounds as though she has been emotionally bereft, a cold city and a motionless heart. Perhaps a loveless childhood has made opening herself up to her feelings feel like a cataclysm, which means that she must go back if she is to go forward. Internally aflame, she must run into the fire to find the door:
The Fire By Mary Oliver
That winter it seemed the city was always burning – night after night the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward. Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed as they ran for the cold streets. That winter my mind had turned around, shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information – drilling down, through history, toward my motionless heart. Those days I was willing, but frightened. What I mean is, I wanted to live my life but I didn’t want to do what I had to do to go on, which was: to go back. All winter the fires kept burning, the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter. I began to curse, to stumble and choke. Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it – the crying out, that’s so hard to do. Then over my head the red timbers floated, my feet were slippers of fire, my voice crashed at the truth, my fists smashed at the flames to find the door – wicked and sad, mortal and bearable, it fell open forever as I burned.
Of course, in the case of actual fires, run in the opposite direction. Metaphorical fires are a different matter.
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Friday
When the founding fathers insisted on freedom of the press, could they have foreseen how billionaires would take over the news, bending it to their own purposes? Much of what has gone wrong with America in recent decades can be traced to Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” Fox News, which amplified a steady stream of rightwing lies, and to Elon Musk’s X, which opened its doors to hate speech and Russian trolls while helping reelect Donald Trump. Founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin must be rolling in their graves.
I mention Franklin because today is his birthday (January 17, 1706) and because, as a printer, he was an outspoken advocate of a free press. He even wrote a poem, “On the Freedom of the Press,” arguing its necessity. It begins with the contention that virtue and freedom are the results of a press “free from force.”
On the Freedom of the Press By Benjamin Franklin
While free from force the press remains, Virtue and freedom cheer our plains, And learning largesses bestows, And keeps unlicens’d open house. We to the Nation’s public mart Our works of wit, and schemes of art, And philosophic goods, this way, Like water carriage, cheap convey. This tree which knowledge so affords, Inquisitors with flaming swords From lay-approach with zeal defend, Lest their own paradise should end.
The press from her fecundous womb Brought forth the arts of Greece and Rome; Her offspring, skill’d in logic war, Truth’s banner waved in open air; The monster superstition fled, And hid in shades in gorgon head; And awless pow’r, the long kept field, By Reason quell’d, was forc’d to yield.
This nurse of arts, and freedom’s fence, To chain, is treason against sense: And liberty, thy thousand tongues None silence who design no wrongs; For those who use the gag’s restraint, First rob, before they stop complaint.
To our jaded sensibilities, the idea that reason and logic could frighten “monster superstition” (let’s call it fabricated news) and “awless power” (power that doesn’t think it can be awed) seems quaint and naïve. But for an Enlightenment thinker like Franklin, it was an article of faith that to chain “this nurse of arts and freedom’s fence” would be to commit “treason against sense.” Would that we still had his faith that Truth’s banner will be waved in open air.
Whether it’s the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and L.A. Times pulling their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris or billionaire Musk driving from his platform people who don’t agree with him, we’re seeing plenty of efforts to apply “gag’s restraint.” These media owners are robbing and then stopping a free press.
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Thursday
I’ve just finished reading James Shapiro’s fascinating Shakespeare in a Divided America, a book that explores how people have relied on the plays at critical points in American history. “For well over two centuries,” Shapiro writes, “American of all stripes—presidents and activists, writers and soldiers—have…turned to Shakespeare’s works to give voice to what could not readily or otherwise be said.” The Bard, he notes, is one of the few areas where partisans have been able to find common ground—although that being said, they have used Shakespeare to advance widely divergent and often conflicting agendas.
To demonstrate how this has been the case, Shapiro focuses on seven moments in American history where historical players invoke Shakespeare’s plays:
–in 1833, Othello played a role in tensions between pro- and anti-slavery forces, especially when it came to characterizing and performing the protagonist. There were also unexpected responses: for instance, former president John Quincy Adams, even though he opposed slavery, was horrified by Desdemona’s passion for Othello and felt that she was asking for trouble when she married him. Miscegenation (or amalgamation, as they called it back then) was regarded as an abomination.
–in 1845, Othello also played a historical role but for reasons of gender more than race: forces sent to Corpus Christi, Texas to fight an expansionist war against Mexico were drawn to the play’s handling of infidelity, which was a concern of their own. In the army production, incidentally, the part of Desdemona was almost played by an effeminate-looking Ulysses S. Grant, who only later would grow the beard we see on the $50 dollar bill (perhaps to appear more masculine). From this mention of cross-dressing, Shapiro goes on to discuss how Shakespeare’s plays raised multiple gender issues at the time, especially Romeo and Juliet, where cross-dressing actresses would sometimes play the part of Romeo.
–in 1849, bloody class warfare was triggered by two competing versions of Hamlet: a British actor who portrayed an introspective Hamlet drew the fire of nativist, anti-British, and anti-elitist forces, who preferred the macho Hamlet of an American actor. The crowd attacked the Astor Theater when the play was being performed there, and it took the militia firing into the mob to disperse them.
–in 1865, a Shakespeare-loving Lincoln was assassinated by Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth. Whereas Booth identified with Brutus in Julius Caesar, Lincoln—in an eerie premonition of his death—saw himself in Duncan, murdered by Macbeth. Lincoln had a lifelong love for Shakespeare, could recite long passages by heart, and often debated with producers and actors about their artistic decisions. This love was acknowledged at his funeral, where Macbeth’s words about Duncan were read and were also used to comfort the grieving public:
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking-off.
–in 1916, Shakespeare became a symbol of Anglo-Saxon superiority and was used to push forward anti-immigrations laws and racial quotas, even though he himself—in his play Thomas More—had written passionately and empathetically on behalf of immigrants. (See my post here on the passage.)
–in 1948, Taming of the Shrew became popular, in part because returning veterans’ anxiety over the women who had taken over their jobs during the war. Shapiro goes into depth about the creation of the musical Kiss Me Kate, which found a way to thread the needle between outright misogyny and what the age regarded as strident feminism.
–in 1998, Shakespeare in Love won multiple Oscar because it managed to thread its own set of needles, these involving same-sex love and adultery. The question of whether Shakespeare has fallen in love with a man is suggested but quickly withdrawn in the movie, and he is also described as having been “banished” by his wife, thereby making his adultery acceptable. The film came out when the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair was blowing up. And indeed Lewinsky used a passage from Romeo and Juliet, run in a Washington Post Valentine’s Day ad, to reconnect with Clinton. Addressed to “Handsome” and signed “M, the passage was Romeo’s declaration to Juliet that true lovers cannot be kept apart:
With love’s light wings did I o’er perch these walls For stony limits cannot hold love out And what love can do that dares love attempt.
Lewinsky later reported that “the President said he had seen her Valentine’s Day message,” “talked about his fondness for Romeo and Juliet,” and gave her a book of poetry. After which history was made.
–Shapiro concludes his book, which was published during Trump’s second year in office, with an account of the Delacorte Central Park Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar. Because Julius Caesar was modeled on Trump. Trump supporters falsely claimed that audiences cheered when Caesar is murdered and took to threatening everyone connected with the production. Although the director thought that the production could lead to nuanced debates about how to respond to authoritarianism—after all, Brutus and Cassius’s belief that violence can be used to save democracy is proved to be spectacularly wrong—America isn’t doing nuance very well these days.
And because of this, Shapiro worries about the future of Shakespeare in America, which he says
is as precarious as it ever has been in this nation’s history. There has always been a tug-of-war over Shakespeare in America; what happened at the Delacorte suggests that this rope is now frayed. When one side no longer sees value in staging his plays, only a threat, things can unravel quickly.
Lest we think that Shapiro’s fears are overblown, he points out that the Puritans closed all British theatres only a few decades after Shakespeare had packed the Globe.
Shapiro’s historical examples challenge a premise that underlies both this blog and my book, which is that great literature is good for us. Can one really assert this confidently when Shakespeare is used to argue both for and against slavery, American imperialism, immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, etc. While I myself would argue that Shakespeare read rightly always expands the possibilities of human liberation—and that the devil can cite the Bard as well as Scripture to his purpose (to quote from Merchant of Venice)—it is unsettling to see Shakespeare’s Brutus as the inspiration for the assassination of Lincoln. For that matter, the depiction of Shylock (so Harold Bloom believes) has done more damage to Jews than the noxious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used to justify the Holocaust.
In any event, Shapiro confirms another point that I make regularly: that in the toolkit we need for dealing with life, Shakespeare is a necessary accessory. One is just never sure how the tools will be used.
