Trump as a Sadistic Steinbeck Bully

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2024
Stelle and Field as Curley and Candy in Of Mice and Men

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Tuesday

It’s been several years since political scientist John Stoehr (of the blog Editorial Board) applied the descriptor of “sadist” to Donald Trump, thereby explaining both the man and why he is popular with a certain sector of the American public. More than anything else, Stoehr says, Trump supporters crave this sadism (it’s why no other GOP candidate had a chance against him). In his article, the Editorial Board editor quotes Humam Abd al-Salam on what right-wingers mean when they complain about people being “so easily offended these days.” What they’re really saying, Abd al-Salam says, is “Why can’t I bully everyone like I used to?”

Stoehr is worried that Trump’s sadism has become so normalized that the press corps no longer even sees it as worth mentioning. Perhaps a literary comparison would help us recognize, once again, the ugliness. I’m thinking of Trump as Curley in Of Mice and Men.

Before turning to Steinbeck, let’s look at a recent instance of Trump sadism. In his Saturday Georgia rally, Trump mocked Joe Biden for his stutter, saying, “I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh together.” Apparently the audience “roared with laughter,” prompting fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat to observe, “He does it to evoke the laughter that makes the crowd complicit and reinforces the culture of cruelty he requires to realize his dreams of mass repression.”

We saw an instance of him doing something similar in the 2016 campaign when he ridiculed reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a congenital joint condition that limits movement in his arms. Trump impersonated the man by contorting his own limbs.

By normalizing or overlooking Trump’s sadism, the media makes it acceptable. Meanwhile, it underreports Biden’s kindness. Following Trump’s mockery, Stoehr notes that a 2020 video resurfaced of Biden encouraging a boy with a stutter. “I’ll tell you what,” Biden told him. “Don’t let it define you. You are smart as hell, now you really are. You can do this.”

Biden continued, “You know when I say I know about bullies. You know about bullies, the kids who make fun. It’s going to change, honey. I promise you.” Stoehr notes that Biden has been interacting with people like this for his entire political life.

There’s a similar dynamic going on in Steinbeck’s novella. Boss’s son Curley, who like Trump reeks of entitlement, “doesn’t give a damn” about others. As protagonist George says after hearing about him, “I hate that kinda bastard. I seen plenty of ’em. Like the old guy says, Curley don’t take no chances. He always wins.”

Curley thinks he’s not taking a chance when he goes after Lennie, the mentally challenged giant who dreams of raising cute little rabbits with George on a farm of their own. Curley is feeling cocky because he has married a beautiful woman—think of Trump’s trophy wives—but he’s also worried that he won’t be able to hold on to her. When both she and two of the farm hands start mocking him, he attempts to regain his manhood by going after Lennie.

And at first he gets free shots because George has instructed Lennie not to fight back. In fact, George has predicted this would happen, telling his friend, “He figures he’s got you scared and he’s gonna take a sock at you the first chance he gets.”

At first Curley encounters no resistance. Thinking that Lennie is laughing at him (he’s not), he yells,

 “Come on, ya big bastard. Get up on your feet. No big son-of-a-bitch is gonna laugh at me. I’ll show ya who’s yella.” Lennie looked helplessly at George, and then he got up and tried to retreat. Curley was balanced and poised. He slashed at Lennie with his left, and then smashed down his nose with a right. Lennie gave a cry of terror. Blood welled from his nose. “George,” he cried. “Make ‘um let me alone, George.” He backed until he was against the wall, and Curley followed, slugging him in the face. Lennie’s hands remained at his sides; he was too frightened to defend himself.

Unable to bear what he’s seeing, George finally instructs Lennie to fight back, which he does. Continuing my political parallel, he’s like Biden using his State of Union address to fight back against the GOP after months of being caricatured as a senile and doddering old fool:

Lennie took his hands away from his face and looked about for George, and Curley slashed at his eyes. The big face was covered with blood. George yelled again, “I said get him.” Curley’s fist was swinging when Lennie reached for it. The next minute Curley was flopping like a fish on a line, and his closed fist was lost in Lennie’s big hand. George ran down the room. “Leggo of him, Lennie. Let go.”

But Lennie watched in terror the flopping little man whom he held. Blood ran down Lennie’s face; one of his eyes was cut and closed. George slapped him in the face again and again, and still Lennie held on to the closed fist. Curley was white and shrunken; by now, and his struggling had become weak. He stood crying, his fist lost in Lennie’s paw.

A number of pundits have noted that Biden’s secret power is that his opponents underestimate him. They have been doing so his entire career, thinking him weak because he reaches across the aisle and prefers quiet negotiation to grandstanding. This is one reason why Republicans were so caught off guard, and why Democrats were so energized, by Biden’s combative State of the Union speech.

Trump mocking him for his stutter after the SOTU would be like Curley mocking Lennie when Lennie is no longer around. But since such a scene doesn’t occur in the book, I need to look elsewhere—to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones—to find an example that fits the occasion. Late in the novel, Squire Western has had his ears boxed by a man whose friend he has insulted—but he doesn’t give full vent to his wrath until the man is safely out of earshot:

The captain, with some indignation, replied, “I see, sir, you are below my notice, and I shall inform his lordship you are below his. I am sorry I have dirtied my fingers with you.” At which words he withdrew, the parson interposing to prevent the squire from stopping him, in which he easily prevailed, as the other, though he made some efforts for the purpose, did not seem very violently bent on success. However, when the captain was departed, the squire sent many curses and some menaces after him; but as these did not set out from his lips till the officer was at the bottom of the stairs, and grew louder and louder as he was more and more remote, they did not reach his ears, or at least did not retard his departure.

So Trump, after Biden administered a Lennie-like beating with his address, sought to recover his dignity by making fun of Biden’s stutter. And got his sycophantic fans to join in.

Classic bully sadism.

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The Green Power of Imagining

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2024
Illus. from Burnett, The Secret Garden

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Monday

Yesterday I presented a talk entitled “‘Being Alive Is the Magic’: The Spiritual Vision That Shapes Francis Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden” to our church’s Sunday Forum. One of the ideas I explored was the power of imagining to change the future.

In Friday’s post, I quoted from my friend John Gatta’s book Green Gospel, where he warns about the danger of environmental pessimism. Hopelessness, he says, can become “a self-fulfilling stance, even amounting to another form of climate denialism if it ends in passive resignation or despair.” To counter such hopelessness, he advises imagining visions of a sustainable future. In doing so, we “enlarge our capacity for hope.”

We see the power of such imagining in a moving scene in Secret Garden. Ten-year-old Colin Cravens has been convinced, by others and by himself, that he is a permanent invalid who is going to die. When Mary Lennox tells him about the secret garden, however, he begins seeing the world, and his own prospects in it, in a new way. At this stage in their relationship, however, Mary isn’t sure that she can trust him with her greatest secret, which is that she has found a way into the garden.

What she does, therefore, is engage him in a process of imagining what the garden must be like. I share the following passage because I think it can provide a model for what Gatta has in mind. If we imagine green energy policy might accomplish—and do so in a way that is not empty wish fulfillment but acknowledges the challenges involved—then perhaps we can help bring about a version of the transformations that we witness in the book: which is a dying garden brought back to life, a disagreeable girl whose heart is opened, and a young invalid who learns, not only to walk, but to run.

So here’s Mary pulling Colin into the imagining process:  

“Oh, Mary!” he said. “Oh, Mary! If I could get into it I think I should live to grow up! Do you suppose that instead of singing the Ayah song—you could just tell me softly as you did that first day what you imagine it looks like inside? I am sure it will make me go to sleep.”

“Yes,” answered Mary. “Shut your eyes.”

He closed his eyes and lay quite still and she held his hand and began to speak very slowly and in a very low voice.

“I think it has been left alone so long—that it has grown all into a lovely tangle. I think the roses have climbed and climbed and climbed until they hang from the branches and walls and creep over the ground—almost like a strange gray mist. Some of them have died but many—are alive and when the summer comes there will be curtains and fountains of roses. I think the ground is full of daffodils and snowdrops and lilies and iris working their way out of the dark. Now the spring has begun—perhaps—perhaps—”

The soft drone of her voice was making him stiller and stiller and she saw it and went on.

“Perhaps they are coming up through the grass—perhaps there are clusters of purple crocuses and gold ones—even now. Perhaps the leaves are beginning to break out and uncurl—and perhaps—the gray is changing and a green gauze veil is creeping—and creeping over—everything. And the birds are coming to look at it—because it is—so safe and still. And perhaps—perhaps—perhaps—” very softly and slowly indeed, “the robin has found a mate—and is building a nest.”

And Colin was asleep.

Because they have this hopeful vision, Colin and Mary are willing to put in the work, both to save the garden and to get well. It all begins with imagining.

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Be Empty and Cry As a Reed Instrument

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2024
Ramadan begins with a new moon

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Sunday

Ramadan, the month of fasting and prayer, begins tomorrow or Tuesday (depending on the sighting of the new moon). George Washington University’s Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Iranian philosopher and theologian, explains what Muslims achieve by prayerfully fasting from dawn to dusk for a month:

A person who fasts with complete faith becomes aware very rapidly that he is a pilgrim in this world and that he is a creature destined for a goal beyond this material existence. The world about him loses some of its materiality and gains an aspect of “vacuity” and transparence which in the case of the contemplative Muslim leads directly to a contemplation of God in His creation.

The ethereal and “empty” nature of things is, moreover, compensated by the appearance of those very things as Divine gifts. Food and drink which are taken for granted throughout the year reveal themselves during the period of fasting more than ever as gifts of heaven (ni’mah) and gain a spiritual significance of a sacramental nature.

Rumi, poet and Sufi mystic, has many poems about the power of emptying oneself out. Here’s one of them:

There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.
We are lutes, no more, no less.
When the sound box is filled, no music comes forth.
When the brain and the belly burn from fasting,
every moment a new song rises out of the fire.
The mists clear, and a new vitality makes you
spring up the steps before you.
Be empty and cry as a reed instrument.

Be empty and write secrets with a reed pen.
When satiated by food and drink,
an unsightly metal statue is seated
where your spirit should be.
When you fast, good habits gather
like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon’s ring.

Don’t give in to illusion and lose your power.
But even when will and control have been lost,
they will return when you fast,
like soldiers appearing out of the ground,
or pennants flying in the breeze.

A table descends to your tents, Jesus’ table.
Expect to see it, when you fast,
this table spread with other food,
better than the broth of cabbages.

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Wilmot, Women, and Sexual Pleasure

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2024
Frontispiece from School of Women, by Nicolas Chorier

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Friday

The blog Lit Hub has alerted me to a recent book, Annabelle Hirsch’s A History of Women in 101 Objects, that features an object celebrated by one of British history’s most notorious libertines. The poem is Earl of Rochester John Wilmot’s “Signior Dildo,” and Hirsch obligingly includes a woodcut featuring that item. We see three women and and a man checking out a shop apparently specializing in dildos, with Hirsch reporting,

During the brief wave of libertinism, some high-society ladies did have lovers. But those who found the risk of compromising their reputation and livelihood too great (while men have always been able to cheat to great acclaim, women have not) survived attacks of acute boredom by reaching for objects like this one. The sex-toy business seems to have experienced a small boom in the seventeenth century: dildos were produced in greater numbers and various materials; some could be filled with liquid to simulate ejaculation.

Hirsch reveals that

Venice was in those days what you might call the capital of refined sex. Accordingly, the glass-blowing island of Murano was known not just for its famous chandeliers, candlesticks, glasses, and other pretty objects—but also as a dildo factory. In a well-to-do household, masturbation (if indulged in) was to be aided by the very finest glassware, if you please, despite the fact that onanism was second only to coitus interruptus—which, incidentally, is linked in the Bible to the story of Onan—as the Church’s worst nightmare.

Wilmot was very much in favor of sexually liberated women. In one of my favorite of his poems—“To a Lady in a Letter”—he encourages his mistress to go out sleep with other men while he is boozing it up with his male companions. “For did you love your pleasure less,/ You were no match for me,” he tells her before concluding,

Whilst I my pleasure to pursue,
    Whole nights am taking in
The lusty juice of grapes, take you
    The juice of lusty men.

Author Aphra Behn, among other women, was inspired by Wilmot, putting him in her play The Rover as Willmore. Protagonist Helena proves more than a match for cavalier.

But here’s the poem that came to my mind as I was reading Hirsch’s excerpt. I think it refers to actual ladies, which means that the upper class circles would have found it particularly titillating, something Charles’s court expected from Wilmot, who served as almost the official jester. The poem itself is repetitive so you may not want to read it in its entirety, but you can have fun imagining the stir it would have caused:

Signior Dildo
By John Wilmot

You ladies of merry England
Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,
Pray, did you not lately observe in the show
A noble Italian called Signior Dildo?

This signior was one of the Duchess’s train
And helped to conduct her over the main;
But now she cries out, ‘To the Duke I will go,
I have no more need for Signior Dildo.’

At the Sign of the Cross in St James’s Street,
When next you go thither to make yourselves sweet
By buying of powder, gloves, essence, or so,
You may chance to get a sight of Signior Dildo.

You would take him at first for no person of note,
Because he appears in a plain leather coat,
But when you his virtuous abilities know,
You’ll fall down and worship Signior Dildo.

My Lady Southesk, heaven prosper her for’t,
First clothed him in satin, then brought him to court;
But his head in the circle he scarcely durst show,
So modest a youth was Signior Dildo.

The good Lady Suffolk, thinking no harm,
Had got this poor stranger hid under her arm.
Lady Betty by chance came the secret to know
And from her own mother stole Signior Dildo.

The Countess of Falmouth, of whom people tell
Her footmen wear shirts of a guinea an ell,
Might save that expense, if she did but know
How lusty a swinger is Signior Dildo.

By the help of this gallant the Countess of Rafe
Against the fierce Harris preserved herself safe;
She stifled him almost beneath her pillow,
So closely she embraced Signior Dildo.

The pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland,
Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand;
But by rubbing and scrubbing so wide does it grow,
It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.

Our dainty fine duchesses have got a trick
To dote on a fool for the sake of his prick,
The fops were undone did their graces but know
The discretion and vigor of Signior Dildo.

The Duchess of Modena, though she looks so high,
With such a gallant is content to lie,
And for fear that the English her secrets should know,
For her gentleman usher took Signior Dildo.

The Countess o’ th’ Cockpit (who knows not her name?
She’s famous in story for a killing dame),
When all her old lovers forsake her, I trow,
She’ll then be contented with Signior Dildo.

Red Howard, Red Sheldon, and Temple so tall
Complain of his absence so long from Whitehall.
Signior Barnard has promised a journey to go
And bring back his countryman, Signior Dildo.

Doll Howard no longer with His Highness must range,
And therefore is proferred this civil exchange:
Her teeth being rotten, she smells best below,
And needs must be fitted for Signior Dildo.

St Albans with wrinkles and smiles in his face,
Whose kindness to strangers becomes his high place,
In his coach and six horses is gone to Bergo
To take the fresh air with Signior Dildo.

Were this signior but known to the citizen fops,
He’d keep their fine wives from the foremen o’their shops;
But the rascals deserve their horns should still grow
For burning the Pope and his nephew, Dildo.

Tom Killigrew’s wife, that Holland fine flower,
At the sight of this signior did fart and belch sour,
And her Dutch breeding the further to show,
Says, ‘Welcome to England, Mynheer Van Dildo.’

He civilly came to the Cockpit one night,
And proferred his service to fair Madam Knight.
Quoth she, ‘I intrigue with Captain Cazzo;
Your nose in mine arse, good Signior Dildo.’

This signior is sound, safe, ready, and dumb
As ever was candle, carrot, or thumb;
Then away with these nasty devices, and show
How you rate the just merit of Signior Dildo.

Count Cazzo, who carries his nose very high,
In passion he swore his rival should die;
Then shut himself up to let the world know
Flesh and blood could not bear it from Signior Dildo.

A rabble of pricks who were welcome before,
Now finding the porter denied them the door,
Maliciously waited his coming below
And inhumanly fell on Signior Dildo.

Nigh wearied out, the poor stranger did fly,
And along the Pall Mall they followed full cry;
The women concerned from every window
Cried, ‘For heaven’s sake, save Signior Dildo.’

The good Lady Sandys burst into a laughter
To see how the ballocks came wobbling after,
And had not their weight retarded the foe,
Indeed’t had gone hard with Signior Dildo.

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Earth-Hearted Hope for Dark Times

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2024
Water Ouzel as depicted by John Muir

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Thursday

Our Lenten study group continues to discuss John Gatta’s book Green Gospel, which appears particularly timely given that (following yesterday’s primaries) the GOP has all but chosen a man who promises to “drill, drill, drill” if he becomes “dictator on day one.” Even if Trump loses in November, Gatta reminds us that “we are unlikely in this century to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade and will be hard pressed, even with serious mitigation measures, to limit it to 2 degrees Centigrade.” Indeed, it appears

already be too late to reverse the overall slide toward atmospheric degradation, too late to restore the wondrous old earth of preindustrial recollection, still largely in view just a few decades ago. The radically accelerated pace of greenhouse gas absorption into the atmosphere during the last thirty years means that this momentous transformation took place during an interval when the world had already been alerted to the peril that excessive emissions posed to life as we know it. Never has the human proclivity toward denial been so disheartening and so dangerous. Without some currently unforeseen breakthrough in technology, apparently the best outcome we might expect now is an appreciative mitigation of those otherwise grave debasements of planetary life that now seem likely.

That being acknowledged, Gatta still counsels hope, and it is this aspect of his argument that I focus on today. In his chapter “Toward a Gospel of Hope, on and for Earth as It Is in Heaven,” he cites John Muir and Emily Dickinson to advocate for what he calls “earth-hearted hope.”

Gatta asks how we are to survive what Mary Evelyn Tucker calls “a tsunami of sadness,” which “engulfs everyone cognizant of the immense losses already suffered or projected to arrive in the wake of climate change.” Hopelessness, he warns, can become “a self-fulfilling stance, even amounting to another form of climate denialism if it ends in passive resignation or despair.”

For a more positive response, Gatta has suggestions. As a Christian, he looks towards religious faith. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann, he notes, articulated a “theology of hope” that “strains after the future” and that, while it seeks inspiration beyond the world as we know it, “does not suppress or skip the unpleasant realities.” One figure buoyed by such faith-based hope, he says, was William Wilberforce, who agitated tirelessly against slavery for much of his life and finally saw it abolished shortly before he died. His faith sustained him throughout “decades of rejection and discouragement.”

 But one can also look to nature, and it is here where Muir and Dickinson come in:

Creatures from the animal realm, too, can teach us something about single-minded persistence. John Muir was much taken, for example, by the irrepressible vigor and endurance of the water ouzel, a diminutive bird of the Sierra who impressed Muir by flying fearlessly into mountain torrents, and by continuing to sing sweetly regardless of storm or seasons. In a similar vein, poet Emily Dickinson chose a bird’s tenacious bearing as her figure of active resolve when she wrote of how “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words /And never stops at all.”

The full poem, as you probably know, goes as follows:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

By imagining visions of a sustainable future, Gatta says, “we might look together not only to express but also to enlarge our capacity for hope.” Such sustainability includes new forms of renewable energy and efforts “to develop regenerative modes of agriculture, a rewilding of ecosystems and ruined landscapes, and the restorative designation of oceanic ‘no fish zones.’”

Gatta also suggests three personal ways to develop earth-hearted hope. First, one can intensify one’s commitment to pursuing “early-friendly patterns of daily living for oneself,” focusing on “our relation to energy and land use, housing and transportation, toxic consequences of our domestic habits, and our inevitable involvement in food acquisition and consumption.”

Second, one can engage in activism geared toward environmental remediation, at the very least through voting deliberately and offering financial support. Finally, there is “earth-engaged personal meditation, Rule of Life, and sacramental worship.” All of these strengthen our hope muscles.

It so happens that yesterday I was reading a blog post by Rev. Daniel Schultz on how feelings of doom—or DOOM—can function like a virus. As Schultz notes,

DOOM spreads easily: Our brains are tuned to the negative, hyperalert to threat, focused on the evil that may befall us. Expressions of despair and maximal cynicism are quickly picked up and transmitted. The disease vectors of social media make sure of that.

But (and here’s where he agrees with Gatta), he says that hope too is a virus, one which spreads through giving and receiving support. Writing about a 4th century Christian monk who grappled with “acedia” or “a state of restless futility,” Schultz notes that Evagrius Ponticus offered the simple and practical advice “to divide ourselves in two,” with one part to encourage and the other part to be encouraged. “Thus,” Evagrius said, “we are to sow seeds of a firm hope in ourselves.” 

“Figuring out how to keep ourselves in the game,” Schultz adds, “helps us to understand what it will take to win other battles.”

As literature professor Gatta knows well, sometimes poetry aids us in that endeavor.

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Quiz: Beowulf or Ikea?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2024
Poster of the Beowulf-Breca swimming contest

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Wednesday

My cousin Phoebe Conant sent me the following Beowulf quiz from the University of Chicago alumni magazine. Since we give pride of place to the Anglo-Saxon epic in this blog—even though it functions as a metonym for literature in general—I thought I’d pass it along. Although I’ve read the poem dozens of times, I did not achieve a perfect score:

Beowulf character or Ikea product?
1. Beanstan
2. Eanmund
3. Gradvis
4. Breca
5. Froda
6. Starreklinte
7. Bergtunga
8. Nereby
9. Ingeld
10. Korvmoj
11. Ecglaf
12. Elan
13. Malm
14. Scyld
15. Ingabritta
16. Skurar
17. Fitela
18. Balungen
19. Merewing
20. Flisat

Answers

The fun part of the quiz is that some of the Ikea products do indeed sound like Beowulf characters. The quiz offers extra points for identifying the particular Ikea products, and I’m proud to say that I failed that part utterly. I’m less proud of having missed three Beowulf characters although (in my defense) Beanstan, Elan, and Merewing don’t show up in either the Seamus Heaney or the Burton Raffel translations of Beowulf. Beanstan is the father of Breca, whom Beowulf bests in a swimming contest; according to Wikipedia Elan is (thanks to a corrupted document) an incomplete name for Yrsa, Hrothgar’s sister; and Merewing is a different spelling of Merovingian, another name for the Franks. Wiglaf predicts that the Merovingians will be invading Geatland now that Beowulf is dead.

Here are the answers (B for Beowulf, I for Ikea)

1-B; 2-B; 3-I(design line: planters, vases, mister); 4-B; 5-B; 6-I (rug); 7-I (cutting board); 8-I (wall shelf set); 9-B; 10-I (veggie dog); 11-B; 12-B; 13-I (design line: furniture); 14-B; 15-I (throw blanket); 16-I (candle holder); 17-B; 18-I (bathroom accessories); 19-B; 20-I (playroom items)

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Even Dead Trees Cast a Shadow

By Robin Bates | Published: March 4, 2024
Ivan Shishkin, Fallen Tree

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Tuesday

I recently stumbled across this Laura Gilpin poem and felt compelled to share it today. In many cultures, honoring one’s departed forebears is a bigger deal than it is in the United States. This poem helps us understand the deep wisdom underlying ancestor worship.

Life After Death
By Laura Gilpin

These things I know:
How the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
so that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest
inside the dead tree
so that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

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Biopunk and a Judge’s IVF Ruling

By Robin Bates | Published: March 3, 2024

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Monday

An Alabama judge ruling that frozen IVF embryos are children is causing acute distress amongst certain Republicans. Those politicians who contend that a fertilized egg should have the same rights as people must now explain to angry constituents why it’s okay to destroy extra embryos. Or for that matter, to engage in a process that will invariably result in the “deaths” of many of these children.

I thought of the Alabama case recently when I was sitting on a dissertation proposal committee. A Bosnian student at the University of Ljubljana wishes to write a dissertation about biopunk fiction and (since we approved her proposal) will be writing on works that grapple with some of the issues raised by the Alabama case. In her proposal Majda noted that, since biotechnology has had such a profound impact upon our lives, biopunk has arisen to mirror and explore the new developments.

Majda says that Biopunk, which emerged during the 1990s,

deals with biotechnology, depicting a futuristic society that misuses biotechnology to gain power and exert control. Biopunk’s futuristic setting discusses genetic engineering and enhancement and shows the consequences of unchecked powers of biotechnology.The definition of what constitutes biopunk is taken further by [German literature professor Lars] Schmeink, who terms it as, “a creative exploration not only of the technoscientific possibilities of further progress in genetics, but also of the environmental and social consequences.”

The biopunk novels that Majda will focus on are Greg Bear’s Blood Music, Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.

To be sure, biopunk has been around (although not with that label) since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and even earlier. Indeed the golem figure of Jewish folklore, a creature created from inanimate clay or mud that would rise up and protect the Jewish people, goes back to the Middle Ages. But the acceleration of biotechnology in our own time has increased anxieties about what is human and what is not. Horror fiction often has this anxiety at its core.

To be sure, people often pick and choose which instances of biotechnology they wish to attack and which to let slide. Since many wealthy Republicans have given birth thanks to IVF, Republican politicians are rushing to defend that. Whereas when medical technology determines that a fetus threatens the life of a woman, multiple states are determining that she should just let nature take its course.

Certain people think nature should also take its course with regard to Covid—or they think it should until they actually contract the disease. Anti-vaxxers rail against vaccines although one wonders whether they would be quite so vociferous if their children started contracting measles, polio, smallpox, etc. As it is, they function as free riders on the herd immunity that arises when everyone around them is vaccinated.

But set all that aside for a moment. The best biopunk doesn’t offer facile plots but explores how definitions of “the human” keep changing. Our biological selves are now so bound up with scientific and technological advances that at times it is impossible to separate the two. Majda’s project will extend our understanding of what perceptive authors make of this situation.

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Imagining a New Creation

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2024
Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom (1834)

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Sunday

I report again today on John Gatta’s Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, which is the subject of our Lenten study this year. As I’ve been noting, Gatta believes that Christian faith applies to all creation, not only humans. If this is true, then nature experiences some version of sin and salvation. At one point in his second chapter, Gatta writes,

 St. Paul affirms that the rest of creation, too, shares in humanity’s wounded condition. Suffering from a certain incompleteness and “bondage to decay,” the whole creation in his view has been “groaning in labor pains,” waiting “in eager longing” for a redemptive liberation to be achieved in and through Christ (Romans 8:19, 21–22).

John acknowledges that it’s difficult to envision such fallenness, as well as what redemption might look like. “We realize, of course, that nonhumans suffer many ills—including, on the part of sensate animals, physical pain, loss, dislocation, terror, and death—even if they are not capable of sin,” he writes, adding,

We may even dream of a transformed biological order, free of predatory violence, that resembles the “Peaceable Kingdom” prophesied by Isaiah (11:1–9) and often represented pictorially by Quaker artist Edward Hicks.

I note in passing that John Milton, in Paradise Lost, sees creation suffering a fall along with Adam and Eve. Whereas the weather in Eden has been temperate and all the animals vegetarians, Milton says the humans tasting the forbidden fruit changes all that. Suddenly we have seasons:

                                                             The sun
Had first [God’s] precept so to move, so shine,
As might affect the earth with cold and heatScarce tolerable; and from the north to call
Decrepit winter; from the south to bring
Solstitial summer’s heat.   

And because death has entered the world, animal behavior changes as well:

 Beast now with beast ‘gan war, and fowl with fowl,                        
And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving,
Devoured each other; nor stood much in awe
Of Man, but fled him; or, with countenance grim,
Glared on him passing.

Of course, Milton believes that nature’s fall from perfection is all due to humanity. And while it is true that humans have had a disproportionate impact on the world, Gatta’s vision of creation goes beyond humans. Because it does, he must acknowledge the limits of his vision:

What God’s redemption of all creation might ultimately look like, …I cannot pretend to know. I know only that a Christian faith worthy of the name must presume that God somehow wills to bring to fulfillment not human beings alone but everything God had ever created, sustained, and esteemed as “very good.”

Gatta then points to the “larger life mystery of symbiotic processes reflected in nature”:

 We know that through the course of earth’s biological cycles death, dissolution, and decay are perforce conjoined with the emergence of new life. Poet Walt Whitman helps us remember that dead bodies make for “good manure.” Vedic teaching likewise recognizes the interwoven texture of death and life, affirming that Lord Brahma, as creator, must be seen as more nearly partner than adversary of Lord Shiva, the destroyer.

Along these lines, Gatta cites one of Wendell Berry’s sabbath poems, noting that it is informed by St. Paul’s reflections on creation and that it “beautifully captures this cyclic dynamic rooted in a transformational falling and rising”:

What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty
To end travail and bring to birth
Their new perfection in new earth. . . .
What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall—field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.

God is what stands “whole in every piecemeal thing that stood,” the underlying creative force. “Fall” invokes the original fall, which is countered by all of nature rejoining “the primal Sabbath’s hymn.”

 While Gatta doesn’t want to privilege humankind over the rest of creation, he also doesn’t want to downplay the significance of humankind in nature’s journey. There are environmentalists who essentially see humans as creation’s original sin, messing up an otherwise perfect nature. I pick up some of this sentiment in Sarah Teasdale’s post-World War I poem “Then Will Come Soft Rain,” which dreams of a world in which humans have eradicated themselves:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Teasdale seems to regard humans as an unfortunate desecration of nature’s innocence. But humans have also produced beautiful poems like Teasdale’s. Through the human mind, nature comes to know itself, and while that can have bad effects, it can also have good ones. In other words, by evolving to include humans, nature is changing in remarkable ways, and who knows what the future holds? Why long for a blissful pre-human past when the future could be (emphasis on “could” as there are no guarantees) even more exciting? As Gatta puts it,

For Christians, the doctrine of a “fortunate fall,” or felix culpa, derives from recognition that through the saving deed of Christ’s death and resurrection, humankind’s moral standing or nature has been marvelously elevated to a level even above that presumed in its pre-lapsarian state.

In the final stanzas of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael promises Adam,

for then the Earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days.

To which Adam responds,

O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness!  

A new creation surpassing the original creation, in other words.

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