Trump’s plans for the new $1 billion White House ballroom
Wednesday
While I have zero interest in celebrity culture and in extravagant affairs like the recent Met Gala, my attention was recently caught by an Amazon workers protest. Apparently Jeff Bezos and his wife, who paid $10 million to host the affair, were greeted by hundreds of bottles filled with yellow liquid inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Apparently Amazon delivery drivers are being forced to urinate in bottles and sometimes poop in bags because they are not granted time off for bathroom breaks.
The story is emblematic of GOP class warfare, where legislators cut taxes on billionaires while slashing safety net programs that support America’s needy. Meanwhile the president, even as his tariffs and war push up grocery and gas prices, gilds the White House with gold and obsesses over plastering his name and picture all over buildings, coins, airports, passports, and elsewhere. Oh, and his new ballroom, which he said would be privately funded, now looks as though it will cost $1 billion of taxpayer money. “Build the ballroom!” has become the 2026 version of “Build the wall!”
It’s enough to send one back to Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.
Dickens novel, of course, is about what happens when extreme poverty meets extreme wealth. Here’s a passage on poverty:
The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
A major political question is how Trump can maintain the loyalty of white working-class voters while shrugging off their affordability concerns. Dickens provides a kind of answer in the “mender of roads” character. Even though the man himself experiences hunger, he fixates on the lives of the glitterati:
[S]oon the large-faced King and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine lords; and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the Queen, Long live everybody and everything!… Then, there were gardens, courtyards, terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and Queen, more Bull’s Eye, more lords and ladies, more Long live they all! until he absolutely wept with sentiment. During the whole of this scene, which lasted some three hours, he had plenty of shouting and weeping and sentimental company, and throughout Defarge held him by the collar, as if to restrain him from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to pieces.
The Defarges, who will play key roles in the revolution to come, have brought the man to Versailles as part of their grand plan. “You are the fellow we want,” Defarge tells him. “You make these fools believe that it will last forever. Then, they are the more insolent, and it is the nearer ended.”
Is it because his fans have been letting Trump get away with his non-stop corruption that he thinks he can be brazenly open about it. Do his insolent relatives and billionaire friends figure the flush times will last forever because Trump won a second term? How willing will the MAGA faithful be to turn a blind eye when gas reaches $5 a gallon? By the end of the novel, the road mender has become a wood sawyer making jokes about cutting off heads.
While Dickens’s novel makes clear that violence is not the answer, how about a major party realignment and enlightened tax policy? That would begin addressing the ills besetting our nation.
Imagine fewer lords and ladies and more food for the hungry. Might an average mender of roads vote for that?
As our reactionary Supreme Court attempts to put the last nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act, states throughout the south (including my own Tennessee) are striving to remove as many Black legislators as possible from government. On April 15, the 161st anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death, historian Heather Cox Richarson provided a useful overview of the fascist right’s relentless assaults on African Americans ever since. The racism that fueled the civil war has never vanished from the American psyche.
Richardson quotes from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his powerful response to Lincoln’s death, and it’s instructive to revisit the poet’s heartbreak now, when we worry that we may need a similar elegy to mourn the death of America as a multiracial democracy.
Richardson notes that, following Lincoln’s death, his Tennessean successor Andrew Johnson tried to reverse the hard-fought gains of African Americans. While Congress fought back, the lack of accountability for the bloodiest and costliest war of the 19th century meant that “the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious.” Former Confederates, the historian notes, “still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support.”
And so it has been ever since. Whenever the federal government intervened to protect minority rights, southern whites complained about an overreaching government threatening individual liberty. This, Richardson writes, “became an article of faith among the radical right.” Southerners also rewrote the Civil War as a noble “lost cause”—this is how I was taught it in seventh grade Tennessee history—and that mythology spread to northern and western states, where white supremacists had their own anxieties about minority groups. On January 6, 2021, a Confederate flag was even carried by Trump rioters assaulting the Capitol.
So with Trump pardoning those rioters; with the Supreme Court killing the Voting Rights act, granting Trump total immunity, and leading the attack on women’s reproductive choices; with the administration attacking on environmental regulation, renewable energy, federally-owned nature preserves, and sacred Indian sites; with governmental heads, including Pete Hegseth, firing African Americans indiscriminately; and with billionaires, domestic and foreign, corrupting officials with their money, many of us feel like Whitman solitary hermit in the poem. We’re mourning the death of the American promise as the poet thrush mourns Lincoln’s death:
Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat, Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
I can think of few more powerful images in American poetry than “song of the bleeding throat.” The pastoral elegy does what the great elegies do, providing the poet a means of expressing and exploring intense grief:
O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
The poem opens with a profound irony that I remember noticing when my own son died in April, which is that nature, oblivious to human sorrow, doesn’t stop springing to life. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,/ And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,” Whitman writes, “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
Noting the irony, T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land” in a poem that owes much to Whitman.
And yet, this “ever-returning spring” will become a source of hope as “Lilacs” progresses and can also bolster those of us reeling from Trump’s assaults on the American dream. As the train carrying Lincoln’s body to Illinois passes through the landscape, Whitman senses a resilient and vibrant nation. Imagining America as a burial chamber, Whitman says he will hang the following pictures on its walls:
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there, With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows…
And because he is the poet of all America, not just rural America, Whitman includes cities in his pastoral elegy, including “my own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships.” He also mentions a generalized city, “with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,/ And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.”
So yes, while Death enters into the drama, it does not get the last word, even though Death claimed not only Lincoln’s but thousands of Civil War soldiers (“I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,/ And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them”). This is not a facile optimism but a profound understanding of how death can be followed by new life. The fact that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday is not lost on Whitman.
Recently I wrote about feminist Rebecca Solnit’s optimism and how she cites Antonio Gramsci’s “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” As Solnit observes about her latest book,
People do not remember the past … [they] often seem to live in a perpetual present. And some find that reassuring, that nothing is ever going to change. Some find it despair-inducing, because nothing is ever going to change. I wanted, in this horrible moment, to remind people that what the far right is doing globally, I think, is largely backlash. A new world is being born, and they’re basically trying to abort it.
For Solnit as for Whitman, the life cycle will emerge triumphant, bringing with it healthy change:
Fossil fuel lobbyists cannot undo it. Putin and Trump and that idiot in Argentina [Javier Milei] cannot undo it. They’re trying to push rewind on the VCR, which feels like the right technological moment in history for them. They’re essentially saying, if you listen closely: ‘You all are very powerful. You’ve changed the world profoundly, with the environmental and climate work, feminism, queer rights, the general anti-authoritarian push for accountability and equality. All those things are connected.’ Your enemies appraise you accurately, even when you don’t believe it yourself.”
For those at the time, the death of Lincoln seemed like the end of the world. But it takes more than reactionary temper tantrums, no matter how damaging, to end America’s great democratic experiment.
My dear friend Rebecca Adams recently alerted me to Kimm Addonizio’s “Sleepless Nights,” which uses myth and literature to imagine the possibilities for action in the face of oppression. Will we be fatalistic when infants are “left to die on hillsides, Oedipus abandoned” or will we be like the shepherd who rescues him? The poet asks us directly:
if you knew what was coming would you dig a burrow or cower in the shade of a grass blade as the shadow of the hawk passed over or would you be like Antigone, defying the king, refusing to dishonor her slain brother, sentenced to entombment she hung herself—
Sadly, Americans dealing with ICE have had too many occasions to ask themselves about their potential for heroic action. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes,” Galileo observes in Bertolt Brecht’s play.
Addonizio recounts a story with which I am unfamiliar. While I’ve written about how Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island turned to Shakespeare at critical moments, I didn’t know about their performance of Sophocles Antigone. I’ll research that for a future post.
But I did know about the Allies’ use of Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne,” a poem I was required to memorize while attending a Paris middle school. My father, who was in France a month after D Day—he actually landed on Omaha Beach, but it was mostly free of Germans by then—had a record recounting the story of the invasion. Included was the story of how the invading forces sent out the first three lines of the beloved poem to shortwave radios to signal that the invasion would commence within the next two weeks. Then, five days later, the next three lines were sent out to instruct the Resistance to begin cutting the rail lines.
Sleepless Nights By Kimm Addonizio
Lately I’ve lain in bed with a disembodied voice, listening to the ancient Greek myths and their meanings, imagining Athens and Naxos and Thebes, imagining infants left to die on hillsides, Oedipus abandoned and then rescued by a shepherd, no one could avoid their fate, not then, maybe not ever, if you knew what was coming would you dig a burrow or cower in the shade of a grass blade as the shadow of the hawk passed over or would you be like Antigone, defying the king, refusing to dishonor her slain brother, sentenced to entombment she hung herself— maybe you know that story, or the one about Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island performing the ancient play, learning it secretly from scraps of paper—or Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” on the BBC, in 1944, the long sobs of the violins, just a few words to signal the French Resistance, imagine.
As I recall the record, the broadcaster said something to the effect of, “And now to our friends in the French Resistances, Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne.” A song about autumnal depression has always seemed to me to be a strange way to announce a hopeful invasion but it serves Addonizio’s theme well: heroic action as the best response to sleepless nights and fatalism.
Few contemporary religious poets cause my heart to soar as much as Malcolm Guite. I recently came across a lovely poem he wrote about a small rural church in Hatley St. George in southeast England. His description reminds me of the small churches in Wales that Julia and I visited a few years ago in hamlets where her grandmother’s ancestors had lived.
A photo of the 14th century church shows a clear window above the altar looking out at “a beech tree’s tender green,” which Guite describes as “holy, open space.” “Stand here awhile,” he instructs us, “and drink the silence in.”
The medieval church is dedicated to St. George, whose feast day was ten days ago, and in his notes Guite distinguishes between the patriotism of “nationalist rhetoric” and “aggrandizing imperial history” and the patriotism of loving “the little particularities of my native land” and “the patchwork of little parishes and quiet shires.” Although the church features “shields of forgotten chivalry, and rolls/ Of honor for the young men gunned at Ypres,” Guite is not interested in Henry V’s “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’” to his Agincourt troops. Instead, he bids us think of all the saints and souls
Who stood where you stand, to be blessed like you; Clouds of witness to unclouded light Shining this moment, in this place for you.
Guite senses, as we sensed in those Welsh churches, that such places hold secrets that we would have access to if only we would open ourselves to them. “This empty church,” he writes, “is full,/ Thronging with life and light your eyes have missed.”
The poem was written during the Covid shutdown so the poet may well have death on the mind. If we remain quiet and attentive, he assures us, we may feel the flicker of an angel’s wing and find our hearts flying free at last in prayer.
Hatley St. George; A Poem for St. George’s Day By Malcolm Guite
Stand here a while and drink the silence in. Where clear glass lets in living light to touch And bless your eyes. A beech tree’s tender green Shimmers beyond the window’s lucid arch. You look across an absent sanctuary; No walls or roof, just holy, open space, Leading your gaze out to the fresh-leaved beech God planted here before you first drew breath.
Stand here awhile and drink the silence in. You cannot stand as long and still as these; This ancient beech and still more ancient church. So let them stand, as they have stood, for you. Let them disclose their gifts of time and place, A secret kept for you through all these years. Open your eyes. This empty church is full, Thronging with life and light your eyes have missed.
Stand here awhile and drink the silence in. Shields of forgotten chivalry, and rolls Of honor for the young men gunned at Ypres, And other monuments of our brief lives Stand for the presence here of saints and souls Who stood where you stand, to be blessed like you; Clouds of witness to unclouded light Shining this moment, in this place for you.
Stand here awhile and drink their silence in. Annealed in glass, the twelve Apostles stand And each of them is keeping faith for you. This roof is held aloft, to give you space, By graceful angels praying night and day That you might hear some rumor of their flight That you might feel the flicker of a wing And let your heart fly free at last in prayer.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 32nd Installment
I’m writing this week’s memoir installment on the anniversary of Justin’s death—he drowned on April 30, 2000—so perhaps it’s fitting that I’m at the point where a scholarship we set up in his name went into effect. We established a student exchange with the University of Ljubljana, with Slovenian students living with us for a semester as they took classes. Meanwhile, students enrolled in the St. Mary’s teaching program traveled to Ljubljana to observe and participate in classes. To date, around 30 Slovenians have studied at St. Mary’s.
Our first student was Anamarija Šporčič, a brilliant woman who now teaches Victorian literature at Ljubljana while overseeing English students studying abroad. We wanted the students to have an immersion experience, and the program succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. As the top English students in Slovenia, these students thrived in their classes—many of our faculty fell in love with them—and they also participated in a wide range of extracurricular activities, such as plays, the literary magazine, the hiking club, intramural sports, and other options. Many report to having had “the best experience of their lives” and now see themselves members of our extended family. They call themselves “the Bates Bunch,” and we reconnect with them every time we return.
Justin’s death made this opportunity possible, an instance of something positive growing out of a dark moment. In return, Julia and I have received a gift that we didn’t expect: we see them having the future that Justin was denied as they have become teachers, translators, editors, film reviewers, tour guides, publicists, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs, as well as spouses and parents. While at St. Mary’s they stepped into their strengths, which they put to use when they returned to Slovenia. We learned that life doesn’t end with a death.
Julia and I have been returning to Ljubljana every two years or so, and teaching at the university continues to reaffirm my awareness of literature’s transformative potential. For the rest of today’s installment I share some of the essays that stick out, going back to the first student to live with us (this in the late 1980s, before the scholarship) and on up to a student from my last visit.
Nataša used her year with us to write a superb and very ambitious senior thesis on Toni Morrison’s novels. In it she noted how the Black protagonists must thread their way between the twin evils of assimilation into White society and the narrow isolation of Black separatism. At the time, it alerted me to an important dynamic in Morrison’s fiction that I had missed. Looking back at it now, I realize that it also spoke to a national drama that Nataša would have been facing. Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia but also saw itself as an ethnicity apart. The question, then, was how could it hold on to its individual identity while still being part of a greater whole.
Versions of this drama continued even after Slovenia gained independence in 1991. Again, a student used the time spent with us to write her senior thesis, this time on the Laguna Pueblo novel Ceremony. The student had a Croatian father and Slovenian mother, and while that wasn’t a problem in the 1980s, in the mid-nineties she found herself facing some discrimination over her last name.
In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Tayo explores how his Native American culture must adjust to white society if it is to survive, even as it seeks to hold on to ancient traditions. Tayo himself is mixed race—his mother was knocked up by a white man—and the theme of mixed blood runs through the book, from the hybrid cattle that he is raising to the mixed-race medicine man who heals his PTSD. Betonie, who lives on the border between white and Indian land so that he can overlook both worlds, uses a combination of Indian ceremony and white therapy with Tayo, and what emerges is a healing vision that addresses the illnesses of both besieged Indian and alienated white society.
When the student returned to Slovenia, she was asked to present her findings to the American literature class. The country as well as she herself needed this multicultural vision if it was to flourish as its own nation. As with most countries, there is a rightwing nationalist streak in Slovenia that demonizes “impure” Slovenians, along with immigrants and former fellow Yugoslavians. As we have seen in Hungary, such thinking impoverishes a nation.
Flash forward to 2024 and the Postcolonial Literature class that I taught in my last visit. Half the class were Slovenians, half students from European Union countries who were there thanks to the Erasmus program, designed to promote “transnational learning, mobility, and cooperation.” I had students from Germany, the Netherlands, Macedonia, and Belgium, all of whom were exploring their own dual identities (they were simultaneously citizens of their home countries and members of the EU). I focus here, however, on a Serbian-Slovenian student, whose Serbian surname was causing her problems.
She had chosen to write about Klara and the Sun, a science fiction work by the Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. As I discussed her essay with her, I understood what drew her to the work.
The narrator is Klara, a sophisticated “care robot” that has been engineered for maximum empathy. A family has purchased her to be a friend to their seriously ill daughter, and the question arises whether she could actually replace the daughter should she die. In the end, Klara figures out what the sick girl needs to recover, a sacrifice on her part as she will be disposed of once she is no longer necessary. Nevertheless, she goes ahead with her insight.
Klara reflects back on the experience from a robot graveyard where she has been deposited as she waits for her solar batteries to die:
I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I’m now sure of this…
My student was experiencing some anti-Serbian discrimination but a ready solution awaited her: she was engaged to a Slovenian man, which meant that she could change her name. The novel stepped into her life at the very moment that she was grappling with the issue.
In our conference, she told me that the novel had helped convince her to retain her maiden name, despite the problems it was causing. Perhaps she realized that she could never entirely become Josie—pure Slovenian—no matter how hard she tried and that it was time to step beyond being a constantly yielding robot. I suspect that, while she identified with Klara’s programmed desire to please, she found, in Klara’s reflections, the clarity she needed to stand in her own identity.
As an aside, I wonder if Ishiguro, transplanted to England at age 6, has a similar drama. In Remains of the Day, for instance, a butler is so anxious to be the perfect butler that he cannot challenge his Nazi-sympathizing master and sacrifices his heart in the process. Although a robot, Klara arrives at an acceptance of her separate self that the butler never does, and it was this self-acceptance that inspired my student.
Not every student I had wrestled with hybrid identity so I’ll end with two memorable responses I received from a high school English teacher who was taking a summer class in 1995. She was from the Bela Krajina or White Carniola region of Slovenia, named for its white birch trees. When we read about a young boy swinging on birches in the Robert Frost poem, she revealed that she too had been a “swinger of birches” as a young girl:
One by one he subdued his father’s trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
What had once been just a colorful anecdote took on for me a new reality.
She shared a more tragic story when we discussed Frost’s “Mending Wall.” In the poem, the speaker mocks his neighbor’s rote insistence that “good fences make good neighbors,” even as he helps him repair the old stone wall between his apple trees and the neighbor’s pine trees. Yet my student revealed the wisdom of the saying with her story.
In her childhood, her father got into a dispute with a neighbor over property lines—perhaps involving no more than a meter or two as the farms were small—and the man killed her father with a shovel. Unable to maintain the farm on her own, the mother had to move the family to Ljubljana. I think now of how powerfully the final lines of the poem must have spoken to her lived experience:
I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Although the old-stone savage may move in darkness, folk sayings can carry deep wisdom, arrived at (to borrow from Mary Oliver) “out of pain, and pain, and more pain.”
I suppose, in a way, this entire post has been about boundaries, both acknowledging them and transcending them. This teacher had to cross a boundary as a young girl, from a rural to a city upbringing. While boundaries offer seeming clarity and certainty, they can also work as traps. I think of what David Brooks wrote in the Atlantic article discussed on Wednesday. After discussing the attractions of tradition, he adds,
Traditionalists strike me as the kind of people who would score extremely low on the personality trait called “openness to experience.” They focus overwhelmingly on the secure base and seem to have no interest in daring adventures. They seem to want to lead stationary lives.
We took the kids to Yugoslavia/Slovenia because we wanted to open them up to experience, and they have grown into imaginative explorers with deep curiosity. We set up the Justin Bates Memorial Fellowship because we wanted to open others to the mind-expanding that occurs when one travels abroad. The Franciscan friar who counseled me following Justin’s death offered comfort as he described it as another boundary crossing, this the most challenging of them all. I think of the lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” that
all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move.
“Marooned in a blizzard of lies,” goes the Dave Frishberg song, but perhaps “drowned” would be a better verb to use in the current environment of Trump’s bogus indictments, reconfigured history, unhinged tweets, revenge fantasies, wild threats, and nonstop bullshit.
Perhaps it would be bearable if (1) at least some in the GOP were standing up to him and (2) if he wasn’t using the full force and resources of the federal government to add muscle to the words. As it is, former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted for photographing and sharing a political message spelled out in seashells, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr is threatening ABC’s license after comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a gold-digger quip about Melania Trump, a joke whose origin dates back to Chaucer if not earlier.
Let’s start with the joke as I want to end with a seashell poem that can be applied to the Comey indictment. Pretending to address the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the attendant guests, Kimmel at one point said, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
After a gunman attempted to crash the actual dinner two days later, Melania Trump accused the comedian of hate speech. His “monologue about my family,” she wrote, “isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” Then she added,
People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
Like clockwork, Trump and his minions piled on. The president said Kimmel should be fired while his press secretary, in a classic example of faux outrage, asked, “Who in their right minds says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?”
Setting aside the fact that there’s nothing in Kimmel’s joke that suggests he was rooting for Trump’s murder, the story of a young wife who wants her old husband out of the way shows up in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” where the young wife of an elderly carpenter devises an elaborate plan to sideline him so that she can make love to their student lodger. There’s also “The Merchant’s Tale,” in which elderly January marries 20-year-old May in order to have an heir, only for her to have a fling with young Damian in (wait for this!) a pear tree.
Three centuries later the joke was still going strong. In John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), for instance, there is this interchange between Peachum and his daughter Polly, who wants to marry Mac the Knife:
Peachum: And had not you the common view of a gentlewoman in your marriage, Polly? Polly: I don’t know what you mean, sir. Peachum: Of a Jointure, and of being a widow. Polly: But I love him, sir; how then could I have thoughts of parting with him? Peachum: Parting with him! Why, this is the whole scheme and intention of all marriage articles. The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife’s spirits. Where is the woman who would scruple to be a wife, if she had it in her power to be a widow, whenever she pleased? If you have any views of this sort, Polly, I shall think the match not so very unreasonable.
And then there’s Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Ernest (1895), which for all I know is the direct source of Kimmel’s joke:
Lady Bracknell: I’m sorry if we are a little late, Algernon, but I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn’t been there since her poor husband’s death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger.
And a little further on:
Bracknell: I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now. Algernon: I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief. Bracknell: It certainly has changed its color. From what cause I, of course, cannot say.
If the Trumps had a more affectionate marriage or if Melania weren’t so clearly a trophy wife, Kimmel’s joke wouldn’t land. As it is, one can’t imagine the first lady being heartbroken if her husband were to move on.
Imagining a world without Trump was also probably the impulse that led Comey to photograph and share a collection of seashells spelling out “8647.” Apparently “86” is slang for disposing of and has been used for everything from indicating that a menu item is no longer available to bouncing unwelcome guests from a nightclub to murder. Trump, meanwhile, is the 47th president, so there you go.
To be sure, when Joe Biden was president, there was an “8646 Joe Biden” tee-shirt, but no one saw this as anything other than a desire to be rid of him. With former Trump attorney Todd Blanche auditioning to become Attorney General, however, he has opted for the interpretation that will please his boss: Comey must be threatening the president.
Stephens’s “The Shell” captures how one can go spiraling down a dark train of thought following a seemingly innocent encounter:
The Shell By James Stephens
And then I pressed the shell Close to my ear And listened well, And straightway like a bell Came low and clear The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas, Whipped by an icy breeze Upon a shore Wind-swept and desolate. It was a sunless strand that never bore The footprint of a man, Nor felt the weight Since time began Of any human quality or stir Save what the dreary winds and waves incur. And in the hush of waters was the sound Of pebbles rolling round, Forever rolling with a hollow sound. And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go Swish to and fro Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. There was no day, Nor ever came a night Setting the stars alight To wonder at the moon: Was twilight only and the frightened croon, Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind And waves that journeyed blind— And then I loosed my ear … O, it was sweet To hear a cart go jolting down the street.
When Biden was elected president, I remember feeling something akin to such sweetness. Finally life could return to something as normal as a cart jolting down the street. No longer would we have to think about the presidency every day.
Then, of course, Trump was reelected and our lives once again became sunless strands, windswept and desolate.
Columnist David Brooks, about whom I sometimes have mixed feelings, has written a superb article in the recent Atlantic on “why reactionaries are taking over the world.” If history appears to be “running backwards,” he writes, it is because traditionalists speak to needs that progressives too often fail to acknowledge. After presenting both the traditionalist and the progressive cases, he concludes by advocating a way forward that (it so happens) is my primary goal with this blog. No wonder I like the piece.
Before getting to that goal, let’s look at how he sums up the warring factions. First, the progressives:
We used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading—toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness, and liberal democracy. Progress was supposed to lead to the expansion of individual choice in sphere after sphere. Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.
Then there’s the disturbing pushback:
The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.
And:
[F]or the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen. Donald Trump, acting like some 16th-century European prince, has made the presidency his own personal fiefdom. Vladimir Putin borrows ideas from reactionary thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin—an Eastern Orthodox, anti-liberal philosopher who rejects the Enlightenment—to justify his imperial conquest of Ukraine.
Brooks also mentions vaccine skepticism, the emergence of tradwives, and the resurgence of 19th-century-style great-power rivalries, such as that between China and America and between Russia and Europe. Oh, and there’s Trump reinvoking the Monroe Doctrine as he attacks Venezuela and threatens Mexico, Cuba, and Canada.
These traditionalists long for the return to some golden age in the past, although that golden age varies depending on which traditionalist you’re talking to:
For some MAGA dudes, it’s the Roman empire, when men were men. For some theocrats, it’s the Middle Ages, when men were monks. In the U.S., many on the right want to go back to the social mores of the 1950s: men in the workplace, women at home; white people on top; epic levels of church attendance; and wholesome fare such as Oklahoma! and Leave It to Beaver onstage and on television.
After examining some of the leading conservative, theocratic, and fascist intellectuals of the past 200 years, Brooks concludes that traditionalists are drawn to roots, stable attachments, and clear moral order (one thinks of Texas posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms). They also desire protection against the cultural depredations of modernity, which explains why (here he quotes Christopher Lasch) lower middle-class culture is “organized around family, church, and neighborhood” and why it values “the community’s continuity more highly than individual advancement, solidarity more highly than social mobility.”
Traditionalists, Brooks concludes,
are right to say that one of the central problems in America and the West today is that many people have lost that secure base—a stable home and community, solid emotional connections, financial security, a coherent culture, and an understanding that our lives are contained within a shared moral order.
That Brooks would express sympathy for traditionalism didn’t surprise me as I have long seen him as a moderate conservative, someone worried by what he perceives as the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s. What I didn’t expect was his critique:
My problem with the traditionalists is that I don’t agree with them about what a flourishing life looks like. Traditionalists strike me as the kind of people who would score extremely low on the personality trait called “openness to experience.” They focus overwhelmingly on the secure base and seem to have no interest in daring adventures. They seem to want to lead stationary lives.
And:
Traditionalists are trying to live the monist dream—the dream that we can build a society in which all the pieces fit neatly together. But the many and diverse values that humans cherish will never fit neatly together. In every culture, groups argue over which values should have priority in present circumstances. There’s never been a tranquil resting spot, and there never will be.
Jesus himself was a Jewish radical, Brooks points out, one who “turned all the power structures of his society upside down.”
Sounding now like a progressive, Brooks points to how the world has changed for the better thanks to progressive ideas:
I look across the past 70 years—years the traditionalists say are filled with moral rot—and I see an astounding widening of the circle of concern. Segregation and racism have been reduced. Billions of women have a greater chance to gain power and professional success equal to men’s. Colonialism has been repudiated. We’ve seen the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world. America has expanded opportunity beyond white, Protestant men. We’ve even passed laws to reduce cruelty to animals.
Always striving to maintain a balance, however, Brooks presents this with a caution about what we have lost, which is the weakening of the bonds between people and of certain elemental commitments to family, neighborhood, faith, and nation. “As part of this general tendency toward individualism,” he writes, “we have privatized morality, telling people to come up with their own values.”
So what’s the solution? Teach the humanities.
For Westerners, this means making sure that people are familiar with the Bible—after all, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Lincoln were—and that they are conversant with “the body of work we call humanism—the great novels, paintings, poems, dramas, histories, and philosophical tracts by thinkers and artists from all over the globe.” We must, Brooks declares, “pass down these sources of moral wisdom from one generation to the next.”
Now for the passage that had me applauding:
I agree with the traditionalists that tradition is important, but I don’t think of it as something we need to go back to. Rather, I see it as something that each generation pushes forward. And for this, we need a humanistic renaissance. In schools, universities, and culture at large, we need to focus more explicitly on the big questions of life: What is my purpose? How should the next generation live? What role should beauty play in my life? How do I build a friendship? What do I owe my spouse, my community, my nation? We need to use the best that has been thought and said by all of the great civilizations of the Earth, but especially by Western civilization, which is our own particular home, our core resource while we try to stumble toward a better future.
You can see why I love this article. Late in the 1980s, when I was a young professor, I found myself objecting to the either/or we were getting from both the right and the left. On the right, there were people like Lynne Cheney and William Bennett, who argued, “Jane Austen, not Alice Walker.” On the left, meanwhile (I draw on Brooks’s article for this example) there were Stanford students chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture has got to go!” For me (as should be clear from this blog) there has always been room for both Austen and Walker.
And what of politicians like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, who wave around “Western civilization” as a cudgel? A familiarity with the great thinkers and works produced by this civilization quickly dispels any facile claim that they bolster authoritarian talking points.
So yes, teach your children well. Include the classics along with contemporary works in your lesson plan.
Donald Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo have prompted commentators to turn to two historical precedents that have generated fine literary works. Blogger Asha Rangappa of Freedom Academy, detecting Henry VIII and Thomas More dynamics at work, mentions Hillary Mantel’s Booker-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. Atlantic’s Peter Wehner, meanwhile, looks at what T.S. Eliot says about Henry II and Thomas Becket in his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral.
Rangappa focuses on how Henry VIII demanded that his subjects choose him over the Pope, which is not unlike how Trump forces his underlings to choose him over the Constitution:
Henry required his subjects to take these oaths after he divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, a move not condoned nor recognized by the Church. He got around this proscription by basically telling the Pope to take the L and making himself the head of the Church of England, and getting Parliament to pass two acts to ratify his break with the church and legitimize his marriage to Anne. These acts mandated the respective oaths: the Oath of Succession acknowledged Henry’s heirs with Anne Boleyn as legitimate, and the Oath of Supremacy recognized Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England.
When Thomas, who had been a close advisor, refused, Henry accused him of treason and tried and executed him. “Very Trumpy!” Rangappa observes.
Although Vice President J.D. Vance has a forthcoming book trumpeting his conversion to Catholicism—Communion is due out in June–he is proving himself no Thomas More. Or Becket either, to shift to an earlier conflict where a king’s command led to the death of an archbishop. One imagines Trump as Henry II saying some version of, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and of Vance immediately choosing to be one of the murderous knights rather than standing up for his spiritual leader. In Trump forcing Vance to choose himself over the Pope, Rangappa says that it’s hard to tell
whether for Trump this is mainly a loyalty-test-as-humiliation-ritual, or loyalty-test-to-tank-JD’s-chances-to-be-president, or loyalty-test-because-this-will-be-the-ultimate-show-of-subservience…or some combination of all three. Whatever it is, J.D. has passed with flying colors, warning the Pope to “be careful” and to “stick to matters of morality.”
To be sure, Trump hasn’t only sent Vance to take down Leo but has been attempting to be an assassin knight himself. As Wehner in his Atlantic article observes,
No president has ever attacked the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church so directly and so personally. Trump called Leo “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” He attacked the pontiff for opposing his Iran-war policy, labeling him a “very liberal person” who is “catering to the radical left.” He also said Leo owed his papacy to Trump. It’s unusual, to say the least, for a head of state—in this case, of the most powerful nation in the world—to treat the bishop of Rome as a bitter political rival.
Wehner then turns to Eliot’s play. To set up the Becket/Leo vs. Henry/Trump parallels, Wehner says there is “a dramatic, even archetypal quality” to the contrast between the pope and the president. On the one hand, Leo is “a religious man in the deepest sense; the whole of his life has been shaped by religious disciplines and a theological tradition. He is inseparable from his faith.” Trump, on the other hand, “measures success by wealth, by power, by sexual conquest. He admitted that he’s never asked God for forgiveness. He has no ties to any church and is in many ways contemptuous of the core teachings of the Christian faith.”
Unlike many of Trump’s Christian evangelical supporters, who have sold out Jesus for power, Wehner says that Leo
is unwilling to subordinate his faith to politics, or to adjust his commitment to the Gospel in exchange for access to power. A man who served the poor in Peru during the Shining Path insurgency—he stayed when others left—is not particularly fearful of critical posts on Truth Social or of those within his church who might disapprove of his public stand in defense of justice and a Christian ethic. He’s a person with deep moral convictions but who holds them with grace and ease. He comes across as calm, centered, and unhurried. He believes he answers to a higher authority; this allows him to offer a true Christian witness. This is a gift to the whole Church, and to the whole world.
At this point Wehner turns to Murder in the Cathedral, where Elliotwrites, “Even now, in sordid particulars, the eternal design may appear.”
What Eliot means here, Wehner writes,
is that in the midst of a broken, chaotic world, where despair often abounds, there is an eternal design at play, even if we may not quite see it while we’re living through it. Nor is the divine set apart from human suffering. Christians believe that God entered into the suffering and violence of this world, redeeming even the “sordid particulars.”
Wehner adds, however, that this “doesn’t happen on its own.” We need religious leaders who believe, as Leo does, that the church should not be “the master or the servant of the state but the conscience of the state, its guide and critic and never its tool.” Wehner cites political philosopher Glenn Tinder, who in The Political Meaning of Christianity asserts, “Love obligates us to stay in the world where most of our fellow human beings are compelled by circumstances to stay.” A prophetic stance is necessary because it “can show us how to live in temporal society as citizens of an eternal society.”
Wehner concludes that such a prophetic stance has been conspicuously missing for the past decade. In fact, it’s rare at any time. We’re seeing it at present, however, thanks to “a native of the South Side of Chicago, who now resides in Vatican City.”
Added note: According to Wikipeida, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” is from the Burton-O’Toole film. In Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play, on which the film is based, Henry II says, “Will no one rid me of him? A priest! A priest who jeers at me and does me injury.” An 18th century author imagines Henry to have said, “O wretched Man that I am, who shall deliver me from this turbulent priest?” And he may have been inspired by a contemporaneous account, from a man present at Becket’s death, who quoted Henry as saying, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!” The film version has become the one most people quote.
In any event, they all apply only too well to Trump’s sentiments about Leo.
As the Guardian wrote about one of my favorite contemporary novelists recently, the headline provides the prompt for today’s post, even though it made little sense to me: “Haruki Murakami to publish first novel to feature woman as lead character.”
It made little sense since 1Q84, my favorite Murakami novel, has a female protagonist.
To be strictly factual,Aoame, a massage therapist and secret assassin (she assassinates men who abuse women and little girls), is a co-protagonist since she shares the stage with math instructor and novelist Tengo, also a wonderful character. Still, I bonded so deeply with Aoame that I blinked twice when I read in the article that Murakami “has faced criticism for portrayal of women.”
Aoame isn’t an exception. Many of Murakami’s female characters live in my imagination, even when they don’t command center stage. If I look at my three favorite Murakami novels, there’s a dowager who runs a house for battered women in 1Q84 and the psychic Creta Kano and the mixed-up teenager May Kasahara in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. To be sure, Kafka on the Shore doesn’t have any female characters that grab my mind, but there’s the wondrous transgender man Oshima, who calls traditional gendering into question. In fact, all these characters are more interesting than male protagonists Kafka and Wind-Up Bird’s Toru Okada. So no, I don’t think it’s a stretch for Murakami’s latest novel to have a female lead.
I’ve been thinking of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle recently because we have our own wind-up bird in southern Appalachia. The pileated woodpecker has a distinctive call (you can listen to it here) that seems a bit like the bird that Toru describes in the early pages:
There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird. Kumiko [Toru’s wife] gave it the name. We didn’t know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn’t bother the wind-up bird. Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighborhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world.
Later, when Kumiko has run away, Toru meets a teenage neighbor. When she challenges him to come up with a nickname for himself—she considers his name boring—“wind-up bird” pops into his head:
“Wind-up bird?” she asked, looking at me with her mouth open. “What is that?”
“The bird that winds the spring,” I said. “Every morning. In the treetops. It winds the world’s spring. Creeak.”
She went on staring at me.
I sighed. “It just popped into my head,” I said. “And there’s more. The bird comes over by my place every day and goes Creeak in the neighbor’s tree. But nobody ever sees it.”
From that moment on, May refers to Toru only as “Mr. Wind-up Bird.”
The pileated woodpecker is an immensely large and prehistoric looking bird that makes one understand how birds are related to dinosaurs or perhaps are dinosaurs. It too has a loud call, and while I don’t know whether Murakami’s bird is a woodpecker, there’s a woodpecker reference late in the novel. Its distinctive drumming again reminds me of our pileated:
Far off in the woods that surround the pond, a bird cried. I looked up and scanned the area, but there was nothing more to hear. Nothing to see. There was only the dry, hollow sound of a woodpecker drilling a hole in a tree trunk.
Our pileated’s drumming echoes through the woods.
What’s the significance of the wind-up bird? Partly it’s that Toru has been living a mechanical existence, and May’s mocking use of the name helps jolt him out of his sedentary life. On his journey to find his wife, he discovers that she is in the grip of forces, embodied by her evil brother (Noboru Wataya), that are corrupting Japanese society. Holding to a daily routine won’t answer the moment.
In past posts about Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I’ve seen these forces at work in American society as well. Here’s what I wrote in one:
[Murakami] seeks to understand the resurgence of rightwing nationalism in 1990s Japan, the so-called lost decade. While the Japanese rightwing isn’t exactly like America’s—Wataya is an intellectual whereas Trump is just the opposite—Murakami grasps how demagogues tap into a reservoir of repressed rage and turn it to their advantage. Both serve as midwives to what Murakami describes at one point as a “gooey white thing like a lump of fat” that proceeds to possess the host.
That gooey substance at one point I compare to “the bile that flows from those Trump supporters shouting racist, anti-Semitic, or misogynist slurs at a rally or indulging in such sentiments from afar.”
Toru at one point discovers this darkness, this penchant for violence, dwells within himself as well. What saves him is his love for Kumiko and his concern for May. He is willing to face up to the dark side of himself and imagine a future where he cares for others. Empathy and love, in other words, are the keys to defeating Wataya. As his wife writes to him,
At least I still had the power to dream, I knew. My brother couldn’t prevent me from doing that. I was able to sense that you were doing everything in your power to draw nearer to me. Maybe someday you would find me, and hold me, and sweep away the filth that was clinging to me, and take me away from that place forever. Maybe you would smash the curse and set the seal so that the real me would never have to leave again. That was how I was able to keep a tiny flame of hope alive in that cold, dark place with no exit—how I was able to preserve the slightest remnant of my own voice.
But back to the bird. There’s something unearthly in the pileated woodpecker’s cry—and perhaps in Murakami’s bird as well—as though they are attempting to alert us to the danger. If that’s case, then the wind-up bird isn’t only a metaphor for our complacency but also functions as an alarm clock. Its haunting cry is attempting to awaken something deep within us.
