Literature in Time of War

By Robin Bates | Published: February 29, 2024
Marcantonio Raimondi, Alexander the Great commanding that the work of Homer be placed in the tomb of Achilles (ca 1500-34)

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Friday

The recent New Yorker has a wide-ranging (sometimes too wide-ranging) article on “the fate—and the power—of books in wartime.” Claudia Roth Pierpont shares fascinating anecdotes about literature attempting to come to our aid when things are at their grimmest. It also has given me insight into my father, who was a soldier in World War II.

Pierpont recounts how “Armed Services Editions” were printed and sent to soldiers during the war.  In 1942 President Roosevelt declared, “In this war, we know books are weapons.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of War Information “issued a poster that framed a photograph of a book burning with the words “THE NAZIS BURNED THESE BOOKS…but free Americans CAN STILL READ THEM.” THEN IT SENT MILLIONS OF BOOKS.” Then, in 1943, millions of books were sent overseas:

These editions were small in format and printed on lightweight paper, designed so that they could fit in a serviceman’s pocket and withstand some half a dozen readings, as soldiers passed them on. (There is an entire book about this series, Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War.) Thirty titles were sent out to start, fifty thousand copies of each. Hundreds of works were eventually added, and the number of copies tripled: fiction, classics, biographies, humor, history, mystery, science, plays, poetry. Bundles of books were flown to the Anzio beachhead, in Italy, dropped by parachute on remote Pacific islands, and stockpiled in warehouses in the spring of 1944, so that they could be shipped to the staging grounds for D Day.

It may have been one of these books—For Whom the Bell Tolls –that made it to my father. It was June of 1944 and he was on night duty in, I believe, Coventry. To pass the time, he was reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel, which Pierpont says became a British bestseller as the war progressed. At first, all was quiet—a night like any other—only suddenly my father heard a loud noise and, looking up, saw that the entire sky will filled with planes. It was the day before D-Day and they were off to bomb German positions in France in preparation for the Normandy landing.

My father would be in France less than a month later, posted as translator for an American unit in charge of the city of Avranches in Normandy. He would then spend time on to the outskirts of Paris before finally ending up in Munich. During that trek across Europe, he carried with him Untermeyer’s famous anthology, Modern American and British Poetry.

I can imagine him reading the World War I poets (whom he would one day introduce to me) like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. He was also drawn to the poetry of Robert Graves, who like these others spent time in the World War I trenches but who wrote a very different kind of poetry. As I wrote in a past post,

I went back and looked at the Grave poems my father read and can see what he would have found in them. Unlike, say, Owen, who unleashes his fury at the absurdity of war, Graves looks for ways to protect his inner imagination. For instance, in “A Pinch of Salt” he advises his reader to “mask your hunger,” which sounds as though he’s recommending the outward fatalism that my father adopted throughout the war to protect his inner sensitivity. If one doesn’t mask, one risks emotional devastation.

Back to Pierpont’s article. Apparently the Nazis, in their plans to invade England, had a “Special Wanted List” of British subject and foreign residents they planned to arrest. On this list were a number of authors, including writers E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Noël Coward, and Virginia Woolf. For their part, the Americans sent over (among other works) a novel by Woolf (The Years), Oliver Twist, Grapes of Wrath, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (one of the most popular), Zane Grey westerns, and Ogden Nash poetry.

Pierpont doesn’t limit herself to World War II. Looking back at the Civil War, she mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although she underestimates the role that it played. While she’s probably correct that it didn’t turn everyone into abolitionists—more people fought to preserve the union than to end slavery—historiaan David S. Reynolds makes a compelling case that the novel made civil war more likely and that it influenced the war’s subsequent progress.

In Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, Reynolds says that the novel rejuvenated and united the abolitionist movement, which until its publication had been scattered and on the defense. He also believes it enhanced the chances of an anti-slavery candidate winning the presidency, even while at the same time it hardened southern attitudes. Both developments were key factors in the outbreak of hostilities. Furthermore, he believes Uncle Tom’s Cabin undermined British sympathy for the southern cause so that, despite Britain’s reliance on southern cotton, it did not intervene on the South’s behalf. The power of the work was such, Reynolds adds, that it probably strengthened Lincoln’s resolve when it came to signing the Emancipation Proclamation, which earlier he had avoided so as not to offend slave states that remained within the union (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri).

Tracking back to earlier wars, Pierpont talks about the importance of The Iliad in ancient times. Apparently people would choose to be buried with passages from Homer’s poem, “as though it were a sacred text.” Warriors would have responded to Homer’s lesson that even those favored by the gods will not be saved and that “man is born to die, long destined for it”:

The story runs thick with the blood of heroes, with the pain and defilement of their wounded bodies, which is presumably why the Iliad, unlike the Odyssey, was not among the books sent to American servicemen. Still, the Iliad has inspired soldiers from antiquity onward. Alexander the Great is said to have always kept it near him, and to have seen himself as a new Achilles, as he conquered lands from Egypt to India.

I note in passing that, whereas Alexander could have made a compelling case for himself as a new Achilles, Mussolini was less convincing when he declared himself to be a new Aeneas, destined to conquer Ethiopia and Slovenia.

Pierpont offers another couple of interesting anecdotes, even at the risk of making her article disjointed. Apparently the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin’s corrective labor camps, used to tell his wife Nadezhda not to complain about their tribulations under the dictator: “Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it.”

Pierpont notes that Nadezhda too had a great faith (perhaps too great faith) in the power of literature:

Immediately after Osip’s death, she tells us, she spent several weeks with a friend who had just been released from a camp, and the friend’s mother, whose husband had been shot. Reading Shakespeare together, the three women paused over young Arthur in King John, whose death is ordered by his scheming uncle but whose innocence softens the heart of his executioner, who can’t bear to carry out the crime. What Nadezhda cannot understand, she tells her friend, is how the English, who must have read about young Arthur, had not stopped killing their fellow-men forever. The friend replies, with clear intent to comfort, that for a long time Shakespeare had not been read or staged, and that people kept slaughtering one another because they had not seen the play. The notion of literature’s power is left intact. The explanation allows for the possibility, at least, that the play will have an effect someday. But Nadezhda is not comforted. “At nights I wept at the thought that executioners never read what might soften their hearts,” she writes. “It still makes me weep.”

Nadezhda’s belief that literature can soften the hearts of evildoers is similar to an idea put forth in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie. Because tragedy “openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue,” Sidney reasoned it would deter kings from becoming tyrants. This is one of the more dubious of Sidney’s contentions, unfortunately. Piermont notes that Stalin, “in his youth, published romantic poems in a Georgian journal and never stopped caring about poetry.” He also was quite the reader and owned some 25,000 books. Hitler, Pierpont adds, owned about 16,000 books, including a hand-tooled leather set of Shakespeare, translated into German.

Although literature can do much good, we can’t expect it to accomplish miracles. Sidney himself said that poetry, in the hands of a bad man, can be corrupted, just as physic can be used both to cure and to poison and swords to aid to heroes and traitors. But acknowledging literature’s limitations, however, should not blind us to its positive effects.

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Tim Scott’s Self-Debasement

By Robin Bates | Published: February 28, 2024
Tim Scott endorsing Donald Trump

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Thursday

Like many who grew up during the civil rights movement, I am appalled at the way the GOP’s one Black senator smiles in the face of Donald Trump’s periodic humiliation of him. It feels like a flashback to that earlier time and brings to mind various poems about the Uncle Tom stereotype. More on those in a moment.

To be sure, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of our foremost experts on authoritarianism, has one thing to say on Trump’s behalf. He is an equal opportunity bully, just as likely to humiliate his White allies as his Black ones:

Trump has used ritual humiliation to make the GOP his personal tool, and the list of Republicans he has mocked publicly is long. In classic autocratic tradition, the more submissive Republican elites are with Trump — supporting him through impeachments, indictments and a coup attempt that sent them running for their lives — the more he openly scorns them, losing few opportunities to cut them down.

Ritual humiliation, Ben-Ghiat notes, is characteristic of authoritarian leaders:

Authoritarian politicians are fragile and insecure creatures, always looking over their shoulders to see who is after them. To build themselves up and deter potential challengers, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand. They apply this same vicious treatment even to their most loyal collaborators, so that no one ever feels safe and thus everyone continues to act in a slavish manner. 

Ben-Ghiat observes that, throughout history, there has been an unending supply “of opportunists and profiteers who are all too willing to play this game, even to the detriment of their dignity.” In her article, she notes that Trump has been particularly keen to enact humiliation on South Carolina’s two Republican senators, the Black Scott and the White Lindsey Graham.

One note on Graham before returning to Scott. For all Graham’s groveling, it appears that, deep down, he is troubled by how he has sold his soul. Trump, sensitive to the slightest sign of disloyalty, knows this. Because there are occasional signs that Graham’s conscience is bothering him, Ben-Ghiat writes,

he will likely continue to be a target of Trump’s scorn. Trump knows that ritual humiliation breaks down the morale of his enablers, who try so hard to please him but never receive absolute validation and at any moment can be taken down again.

But back to Scott, who was publicly humiliated by Trump on the night he won the New Hampshire primary. “I just love you,” Scott said after Trump baited him (“You must really hate her”). But Scott doesn’t need direct prodding from Trump to grovel. Ben-Ghiat reports that

Scott has been performing self-abasement spontaneously, likely to Trump’s delight. “I’m far better encouraging and being excited and motivated for President Trump than I was for myself,” Scott said after voting in the South Carolina primary. And at the post-primary rally, he assured the audience that he would keep his speech short because “the longer I speak, the less you hear of him.”

Trump is infamous for believing that African Americans should “know their place.” There were his racist housing policies and his persecution of “the Central Park Five” (even after DNA proved them innocent of the rape with which they were charged) and his birther charges against Barack Obama. What is discouraging is that 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, a Black man would still behave this way. Which brings us to Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton.

Hughes is repulsed by Blacks who play Uncle Tom, although he at least blames Whites for some of it:

Uncle Tom
By Langston Hughes

Within—
The beaten pride.
Without—
The grinning face,
The low, obsequious,
Double bow,
The sly and servile grace
Of one the white folks
Long ago
Taught well
To know his Place.

Clifton, writing in the militant sixties, is less kind:

robert
By Lucille Clifton

was born obedient
without questions

did a dance called
picking grapes
sticking his butt out
for pennies

married a master
who whipped his mind
until he died

until he died
the color of his life
was nigger

It’s worth noting that, in a poem written four years later (“All of Us Are All of Us”), she has evolved to a kinder stance, choosing not to make a hard separation between, on the one hand, Malcolm, Martin, and various Black activists and slave revolutionaries and, on the other,

Stepen Fetchit
Amos and Andy
Sapphire and
Uncle Tom

In the poem, it’s as though she’s saying (to quote an old Joan Baez song), “Be not too hard for life is short, and nothing is given to man.” Or put another way, we’re all in this together. Here’s the poem:

All of Us Are All of Us
By Lucille Clifton

Malcolm and Martin
George
little Emmett
Billie of the flower
the flower Bessie
all of us are
all of us
Nat
Gabriel
Denmark
Patrice and Kwame
Marcus
black Hampton
all of us are
all of us
Stepen Fetchit
Amos and Andy
Sapphire and
Uncle Tom
all of us are
all of us
Orangeburg
Jackson
Birmingham
here
my Mama
your Daddy
my Daddy
your Mama
oh all of us are
all of us and
this is a poem about
Love

So can we love Tim Scott, with his “grinning face” and his version (when in the presence of Trump) of “the low, obsequious, double bow”? I suspect Clifton would say that even love may have its limits. Maybe the answer lies in the degree to which Scott is willing to enable fascism.

Additional note: The Uncle Tom stereotype, while originating with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is based on the character as he appeared in the “Tom shows,” theatrical versions of the novel in which white actors in blackface offered up degrading caricatures of African Americans. The original Tom is a man of dignity and a Christ figure who is willing to die to protect his fellow slaves. While some, including James Baldwin, still critiqued the novel, Frederick Douglass saw Stowe as an important ally while Hughes saw the book as “a moral battle cry” as well as “a good story, exciting in incident, sharp in characterization, and threaded with humor.”

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Revisiting “It Can’t Happen Here”

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2024

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Wednesday

David Corn of Mother Jones has announced a new series of short videos on the very real danger of a fascist takeover of the United States. In a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Corn has entitled the series It Can Happen Here.

Of course, Lewis too believed that it could happen here, with his title designed to jolt American moderates, liberals and leftists out of any complacency. As Corn explains in the blog post announcing the series, Lewis’s novel

was a reaction to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and the spread of demagogic populism in the United States by Huey Long, the strongman governor of Louisiana, and Father Charles Coughlin, the wildly popular antisemitic radio preacher. In Lewis’ alternative universe, a politician named Buzz Windrip, who champions “traditional” values and who promises to restore America to greatness, defeats FDR in the presidential election of 1936 and then through a self-coup seizes dictatorial powers. He establishes a paramilitary force to do his bidding, curtails the rights of women and minorities, and locks up dissidents and political foes in concentration camps. Eventually, his reign leads to civil war. It’s a grim tale.

If 1930s America did not succumb to the fascist wave, Corn says, it was in part due to the assassination of Long, to Coughlin being forced off the air, and to Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II. So no Buzz Windrip emerged.

But we have a Buzz Windrip now as MAGA fascists pray that Trump will make their fever dreams come true. We saw their desires in full living color at last week’s gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, during which time (according to Corn)

top strategist of the MAGA right, Jack Posobiec, a prominent conspiracy theorist of the alt-right, declared, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He apparently was referring to the Trumpian vanguard present in the room, and [Trump supporter Steve] Bannon interjected, “Amen.” Posobiec, an early promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led to a dangerous shooting at a Washington, DC, restaurant, added, “All glory is not to government. All glory to God.”

Other declarations at CPAC included Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota proclaiming, “There are two kinds of people in this country right now. There are people who love America, and there are those who hate America,” and Trump adviser Stephene Moore asserting that “one of the most evil left-wing organizations in America is the AARP” (!). Shifting novels, Corn notes that “Trump and his minions were engaged in an orgy of despisal akin to the ‘Two Minutes of Hate’ Orwell imagined in 1984.” If you need a reminder, here’s Orwell’s account:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic…. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.

So how worried should we be when Trump labels his political foes as “vermin” or accuses migrants of “poisoning the blood” of the United States? Would a reelected Trump go as far as Windrip? Corn points out that he

 vows to deport millions of people, which would require massive detention camps. He has consistently pledged he would prosecute and imprison his critics and rivals. He has said (jokingly or not) he would act as a dictator only on his first day in office. He has threatened to use the power of government to crush media outlets he doesn’t favor. This is all Windripish. Moreover, throughout MAGA-land, it’s easy to find Trumpists who denigrate democracy and scheme workarounds to direct elections. And the Alabama Supreme Court justice who last week handed down an opinion stating that fertilized embryos are people—a ruling that imperils in vitro fertilization treatments—has stated that the Bible dictates that conservative Christians ought to rule over government, as well as business, media, and education.

Someone, perhaps Lewis, once remarked that when Fascism comes to America, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” In what can serve as a response, someone else said (perhaps Thomas Jefferson but again we don’t know for certain), “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Dystopian novels like It Can’t Happen Here, 1984, and, more recently, Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004) are designed to keep us vigilant. Liberty is too precious a gift to squander.

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Revolutionary Mother Goose

By Robin Bates | Published: February 26, 2024
Edward Cogger, “Hey Diddle Diddle” (1880)


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Tuesday

From time to time I have been posting on Angus Fletcher’s “25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature” (to cite the subtitle of the Ohio State Professor of Story Science’s Wonderworks). Today I look at his account of the revolutionary impact of nursery rhymes, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and A.A. Milne. All of these, he says, have unleashed our inner “anarchic rhymer.”

Fletcher starts his chapter by, essentially, castigating John Locke and the Enlightenment for shutting now our imaginative capabilities. Because of Locke’s emphasis on reason, schooling became obsessed with “morality, sober restraint, and industrious prosperity.” Prior to Locke’s new method for educating young minds, set forth in his Essay on Human Understanding, Fletcher writes that young children

had been told creative fictions about “goblins and sprites.” But no more. In the future, they would be drilled only in the “association of ideas” that possessed “a natural correspondence.” Children would, in other words, be taught the laws of physics. From the cradle to the schoolhouse, they would be told that ice was cold and fire hot; that money bought things and dreams did not.”

Before Locke, Fletcher adds, “a child’s education was haphazard and spontaneous, filled with gaps and free time for random imagining.” After Locke, by contrast, a child’s education

became increasingly regimented, formal and serious. Children were placed in rows of desks, where they memorized rules about counting and grammar. They were taught that playtime was for organized games and sports with rules; they were assigned homework to discipline their hours out of school. And so it came to be that in school districts across the globe, idle daydreaming was replaced by practical life skills, logical decisions, and prudent forward planning.

Only in the late 20th century, Fletcher goes on to say, did scientists make “a startling discovery: daydreaming wasn’t a menace, a defect, or a time-wasting indulgence. Daydreaming was good for the mind.”

When not otherwise engaged, Fletcher says, the brain reverts to play, what neuroscientists call “the default mode network.” This mind wandering

has been linked with myriad psychological benefits. It can nurture creativity. It can inspire fresh solutions to nagging old problems. And it can also just be fun, increasing our well-being and making us more cheerful at life.

Various works of literature have proven particularly effective at “restoring our natural mind-wandering abilities,” with one of the oldest being the nursery rhyme. Fletcher examines “Hey diddle diddle,” noting that the play between structure (the poem has a syncopated metrical beat and catchy rhymes) and anarchy loosens the stricture of reason and allows us to enter a space where anything is possible. Our brains “frolic audaciously into the unknown.”

Charles Dickens critiques the heirs of Lockean regimentation in Mr. M’choakumchild, the teacher in Hard Times, whom Dickens shows is at odds with the world of the circus. But the works that Fletcher uses to illustrate creative anarchy are the poetry of Lear (he mentions “The Owl and the Pussycat”), Carroll’s Alice books, and Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books.

Anarchy always requires some sort of structure to set it off. In Alice in Wonderland, the stability of common-sensical Alice is offset by the crazy events going on around her, while in Winnie-the Pooh, it is Pooh who is whimsical in Christopher Robin’s “sensible story-world.” As an example of the latter, Fletcher mentions the episode where Pooh attempts to disguise himself as a cloud as he invades a beehive.

One final author mentioned by Fletcher is Dr. Seuss, who revolutionized children’s books with the Cat in the Hat:

Something went bump!
How that bump made us jump!
We looked!
…And we saw him!
The Cat in the Hat!

Like Pooh, Fletcher writes, the Cat in the Hat “is an anarchist in a storyworld of rules and order.” The admonishing Fish, I would add, functions as a voice of the absent mother. After having indulged in an anarchic scenario, the child reader returns to the world of order as the Cat returns everything to its proper place.

There were moral censors who objected to the Alice books in the 19th century and self-styled guardians who fulminated against Dr. Seuss in the 1950s. That’s one signs that the authors were striking a nerve that needed to be struck.

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What Are Days For? Larkin’s Non Answer

By Robin Bates | Published: February 25, 2024
Philip Larkin

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Monday

Thanks to Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s blog, I am now acquainted with a lovely Philip Larkin poem entitled “Days.” In a very subtle way, the lyric grapples with the meaning of life, including with whether life in fact means anything at all. “What are days for?” the speaker asks.

And at first, days don’t seem to be for anything other than living in. Put that way, there’s no real difference between humans and animals since, for both, days “come, they wake us/ Time and time over.” One hears an echo of Macbeth here:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. 

Unlike Macbeth, however, Larkin then adds that days “are to be happy in.” There’s a suggestion here that he favors a Taoist acceptance of the life we have been given. But while that sounds fine, it doesn’t strike everyone as an answer. Those who are dissatisfied, Larkin observes, call in doctors and priests, the first presumably to prolong their days and the second to find cosmic meaning in them. Here’s the poem:

Days
By Philip Larkin

What are days for?
Days are where we live.   
They come, they wake us   
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:   
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor   
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Doctors and priests, who wear long coats to signal their authority, seem out of place.There’s a Blakean drama of innocence and experience underway here. In Songs of Innocence, children play in fields, sometimes filled “with many sweet flowers.” But in “The Garden of Love,” where this is mentioned, a chapel has invaded the green while “Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,/ And binding with briars, my joys & desires.”

Difficult though it may be, we must strive to live each day to the fullest, treasuring what we are given without being sidetracked. After all, where can we live but days?

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Every Stone and Every Star a Tongue

By Robin Bates | Published: February 24, 2024
17th century poet Thomas Traherne

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Spiritual Sunday

For our Lenten study, our church is reading Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, by my dear friend and colleague John Gatta. Among other things, the book is giving me a new respect for the 17th century poet Thomas Traherne, who plays a key role in the book. More on Traherne in a moment.

First, however, to John’s thesis, which is that Christianity and environmentalism can complement and feed each other. That’s in part because Christianity does not apply only to human beings. John writes,

Faith must encompass everything—all things seen and unseen, human and nonhuman beings of every stripe, throughout the whole of creation. For us living today, a Jesus capable of rescuing just ourselves, or our kind alone, from sin and death can no longer be recognized as God’s savior of the world. Only a cosmic Christ, as Saint Paul first envisioned, could possibly fulfill that role.

Extending the idea of salvation to nonhumans as well as humans is central to Green Gospel. As John notes, God didn’t just create the universe and then sit back. Rather, God is incarnate within the evolving universe, simultaneously within it and beyond it. This, John says, is the meaning of the trinity, which captures this paradoxical situation:

The vision of a Triune God contributes most critically toward shaping a robust ecotheology, I believe, by holding together, in creative and paradoxical tension, two seemingly contrary notions of the Godhead. Or as [Jürgen] Moltmann puts it, the “trinitarian concept of creation binds together God’s transcendence and immanence,” thereby conjoining the partial, opposite truths represented both in radical monotheism and in a pantheism that would virtually equate Nature with divinity.

The idea of God having created a blueprint in which everything is foreseen, John says, is ironically similar to 18th century deist notions of God as a clockmaker winding up the giant clock of creation. John says that those Christian fundamentalists who embrace the theory of intelligent design, and with it attack attack scientific theories of evolution, turn God into a “lifeless, loveless, and cheerless” being or force:

Far from bolstering esteem for the Creator-God, the ideology of intelligent design fails to recognize the richly creative, cooperative, and dynamic force inherent in the Creator’s inspiration of evolutionary processes. Even if we affirm, in faith, that God is the first cause and ground of all creation, we must acknowledge—as intelligent design does not—the substantial role and freedom that God has allowed within the cosmic drama for all manner of secondary causes and chance developments. Such causes, though sometimes agents of sorrow and malignancy, also infuse into existence a welcome color, variety, beauty, and unanticipated marvels.

In sum, the Creator-God of intelligent design is not genuinely creative—not, at least, by analogy with the sublime expressions of creativity we have come to recognize in great literary authors, composers, public leaders, and painters. Nor is the Designer-God artistic, vital, original, or playful. What this God designs, in figurative essence, is just a series of static blueprints, destined for sequential realization in the material realm. These preconceived blueprints for the design of all creaturely existence might be correct in every detail but comparatively lifeless, loveless, and cheerless in their conception.

A number of poets have seen God is simultaneously prime mover and incarnate in nature, including William Blake (“to see heaven in a wild flower”) and Alfred Lord Tennyson (“Little flower—but if I could understand/ What you are, root and all, and all in all,/ I should know what God and man is”). But one doesn’t need theology or poetry to realize this. Think of times in your own life when you have looked at nature and experienced a sense of the divine, even while knowing at the same time that natural scientific processes were at work.

But while we can know this without poetry, poetry clarifies and intensifies the vision. Take, for instance, Traherne’s poem “The Sand Is Endless,” where he writes,

In all Things, all Things service do to all:
And thus a Sand is Endless, though most small.
   And every Thing is truly Infinite,
   In its Relation deep and exquisite.

In “Dumbness,” meanwhile, he writes,

And every stone, and every star a tongue,
And every gale of wind a curious song.
The Heavens were an oracle, and spake
Divinity: the Earth did undertake
The office of a priest…

Finally, there’s Traherne’s beautiful poem “Walking,” clearly written by someone who treasures the activity. At one point the poet writes,

To note the beauty of the day,
And golden fields of corn survey;
Admire each pretty flow’r
With its sweet smell;
To praise their Maker, and to tell
The marks of his great pow’r.

Traherne  wants us to pay attention when we venture out into nature. Otherwise, we are no more than “dead puppets” whose

              silent feet,
Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good
Nor joy nor glory meet.

Here’s the poem:

Walking
By Thomas Traherne

To walk abroad is, not with eyes,
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;
Else may the silent feet,
Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good
Nor joy nor glory meet.

Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change,
But cannot see, though very strange
The glory that is by;
Dead puppets may
Move in the bright and glorious day,
Yet not behold the sky.

And are not men than they more blind,
Who having eyes yet never find
The bliss in which they move;
Like statues dead
They up and down are carried
Yet never see nor love.

To walk is by a thought to go;
To move in spirit to and fro;
To mind the good we see;
To taste the sweet;
Observing all the things we meet
How choice and rich they be.

To note the beauty of the day,
And golden fields of corn survey;
Admire each pretty flow’r
With its sweet smell;
To praise their Maker, and to tell
The marks of his great pow’r.

To fly abroad like active bees,
Among the hedges and the trees,
To cull the dew that lies
On ev’ry blade,
From ev’ry blossom; till we lade
Our minds, as they their thighs.

Observe those rich and glorious things,
The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs,
The fructifying sun;
To note from far
The rising of each twinkling star
For us his race to run.

A little child these well perceives,
Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves,
May rich as kings be thought,
But there’s a sight
Which perfect manhood may delight,
To which we shall be brought.

While in those pleasant paths we talk,
’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk;
For we may by degrees
Wisely proceed
Pleasures of love and praise to heed,
From viewing herbs and trees.

So go take a walk.

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Conquering the Darkness Within

By Robin Bates | Published: February 22, 2024

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Friday

From my recent immersion in the works of Terry Pratchett, I’ve come to see the fantasy author as a post-modern Tolkien with a sense of humor. Although much more supportive of a multicultural and egalitarian society than Tolkien, like Tolkien he often focuses on the lust for power, which can even corrupt good people. Like Tolkien, he is interested in what it takes to resist the attraction.

Given that Donald Trump is willing to shred the Constitution in pursuit of power and the GOP appears willing to go along, the theme is a timely one.

The ring of power, of course, is the central focus of Lord of the Rings, and protagonist Frodo is able to break free of its spell only through a kind of grace, made possible by the mercy he has previously shown towards Gollum. The latter, who functions as Frodo’s dark or shadow side figure, can be seen as a power addict, hollowed out by his craving.

In Terry Pratchett’s Thud!, meanwhile, police inspector Sam Vimes too finds himself in possession of a destructive power known as “the summoning dark.” In his own Mount Doom moment, he finds the internal strength to resist it.

Written in 2005—which is to say, when the world was experiencing not only an uptick in Islamic violence but also America’s catastrophic response to 9-11 (especially its invasion of Iraq)—Thud! shows Vimes succumbing to a blind rage after fundamentalist dwarfs invade his home and try to kill his child. These terrorists, obsessed as they are with the belief that dwarf culture should remain pure, bear no small resemblance to ISIS extremists. The real drama is whether Vimes, in fighting them, will become like them.

We watch his interior dialogue, which brings to mind Satan’s attempt to seduce Jesus in the desert, an appropriate scriptural passage for this Lenten season. The following passage is told from the Summoning Dark’s point of view, which can’t believe that Vimes is rejecting it. The “figure” in the metal helmet and leather cloak is Vimes, the “entity” the Summoning Dark:

Water cascaded off a metal helmet and an oiled leather cloak as the figure stopped and, entirely unconcerned, cupped its hand in front of its face and lit a cigar.

Then the match was dropped on the cobbles, where it hissed out, and the figure said: “What are you?”

The entity stirred, like an old fish in a deep pool. It was too tired to flee.

“I am the Summoning Dark.” It was not, in fact, a sound, but had it been, it would have been a hiss. “Who are you?”

“I am the Watchman.”

“They would have killed his family!” The darkness lunged, and met resistance. “Think of the deaths they have caused! Who are you to stop me?”

“He created me. Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Me. I watch him. Always. You will not force him to murder for you.”

“What kind of human creates his own policeman?”

“One who fears the dark.”

“And so he should” said the entity, with satisfaction.

“Indeed. But I think you misunderstand. I am not here to keep darkness out. I’m here to keep it in.” There was a clink of metal as the shadowy watchman lifted a dark lantern and opened its little door. Orange light cut through the blackness. “Call me…the Guardian Dark. Imagine how strong I must be.”

The Summoning Dark backed desperately into the alley, but the light followed it, burning it.

“And now,” said the watchman, “get out of town.”

All this, we learn later, occurs during a four-second pause as the sword-wielding Vimes looms over unarmed dwarf fundamentalists. That pause gives his werewolf lieutenant the time to disarm him, Angua being (along with fellow cop Sally, a vampire) a character who must find her own means of controlling her dark side. In the end, lights wins out and peace is restored in the long-running feud between dwarfs and trolls.

Pratchett may well have been responding to how the Bush-Cheney  administration (emphasis on Cheney) used torture and other forms of extra-judicial punishment on those it held responsible for the 9-11 attacks. I think it’s possible that this eruption of the Summoning Dark helped pave the way for Trump, whose blatant disregard for the rules of civilized society seems like an extension of those dark days.

Pratchett has assisted me towards a new understanding of Trump cultism. In the past, I’ve quoted former Republican Tom Nichols, writer for the Atlantic, about how America has become an unserious nation, preferring reality television celebrities to politicians concerned about responsible governance. Building on this, I’m wondering whether this segment of the population is experiencing something akin to an addiction. Just as it has long been addicted to the power that comes with owning guns (including assault rifles), so now it has become addicted to the Trumpian fantasy that one can, with impunity, violate the law, minority and women’s rights, various protocols, and common decency. And there are plenty of politicians, rabble rousers, media influencers, and grifters who are eager to keep feeding that addiction.

How do we encourage people to kick the Summoning Dark habit and join the Guardian Dark instead? As Vimes notes, that’s where real strength is to be found.

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Leo, the Napoleon of Rightwing Courts

By Robin Bates | Published: February 21, 2024
Leonard Leo

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Thursday

How to describe Leonard Leo, arguably the man most responsible for the rightwing tilt of the current Supreme Court? Perhaps by comparing him to Professor Moriarty.

It is with Moriarty imagery that Greg Olear of the blog Prevail uses to describe Leo. But first, let’s look what Leo has done. Here’s Olear:

Leonard Leo, 56, has made himself one of the most powerful figures in the United States. He’s put five—count ‘em, five!—justices on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, and John Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, he quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals). In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. He’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really is the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. I mean, there are only three branches of government. One of those three—arguably the most important one—is Leonard Leo’s domain.

How does Leo wield so much power? Olear explains that his secret lies in networking:

Like an invasive cancer, Leonard Leo has metastasized from the Federalist Society to the broader conservative legal community. He knows anyone and everyone, from John Roberts to Mick Mulvaney to Ed Whelan to Seamus Hasson to Nina Shea to the sommelier at Morton’s who pours out the vino. Despite being a generation younger, he was good friends with the late Antonin Scalia and remains tight with Clarence Thomas…. He delights in pulling the marionette strings. 

And now for the Moriarty imagery:

But it’s the financial networking that moves the needle. Leo sits like a giant spider at the center of a complicated web of non-profits and PACs and 501-whatevers: The Federalist Society, which identifies, develops, and grooms future conservative judges. The Judicial Crisis Network, the PR arm of the operation. The Becket Fund, a legal outfit that does pro bono work for religious freedom cases. The Freedom and Opportunity Fund, which helped bankroll the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hoo-ha. Reclaim New York, a charity Leo set up in 2013 with Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon The Council for National Policy, the Christian coalition group. And God knows how many others.

Olear notes that “for non-profits, these entities sure do rake in the cash.” In the case of his association with Mercer and Bannon, according to a Washington Post article, they pulled in a quarter of a billion dollars in dark money.

Holmes too compares his archnemesis to a giant spider:

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defense. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected. This was the organization which I deduced, Watson, and which I devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up.

Like Leo, few people have heard of Moriarty. Certainly Watson hasn’t, prompting Holmes to exclaim,

Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing! The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That’s what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime.

And in fact Leo, like Moriarty, is fairly unassuming. Olear describes him as “a short, foppish, pear-shaped man, in wire-rimmed glasses and pricey suits. Think a dandier George Constanza.” Meanwhile, we have the following description of Moriarty from Holmes:

He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.

Leo is as much a threat to social order as Moriarty. In a Daily Beast article, Jay Michaelson notes that Leo believes that

most of the New Deal and administrative state are unconstitutional, that corporations have free speech and free religion rights, that women and LGBT people are not ‘protected classes’ under constitutional law, and that there is no right to privacy implied by the due process clause of the Constitution (i.e., banning abortion, contraception, and gay marriage are entirely constitutional).

Whether we see Joe Biden as our Sherlock Holmes or whether we see ourselves, the voters, as the bulwark against a Moriarty victory, the occasion calls for the steadfastness and smarts of Doyle’s great detective. The 2024 election is shaping up to be our Reichenbach Falls moment.

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In Betraying Ukraine, Graham Is an Oswald

By Robin Bates | Published: February 20, 2024
Graham with Zelensky and Blumenthal in July, 2022

Wednesday

I thought I’d seen everything from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, but his recent betrayal of Ukraine after once having supported its resistance to Russia’s invasion has stunned me. In July of 2022 he made a special trip to Ukraine to affirm America’s commitment to the country, shaking Volodomyr Zelensky’s hand and praising  the “resilience and determination of the Ukrainian people in the face of such unprovoked inhumanity.” And now, because of Donald Trump, he has reversed himself, an instance of sycophancy that puts him in Oswald territory, Oswald being Goneril’s steward in King Lear.

The Washington Post reported on Graham’s reversal last week:

Graham voted repeatedly against sending $60 billion in aid to [Ukraine] as well as against other military funds for Israel and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The longtime hawk dramatically announced on the Senate floor that he also would no longer be attending the Munich Security Conference — an annual pilgrimage made by world leaders to discuss global security concerns that’s been a mainstay of his schedule.

“I talked to President Trump today and he’s dead set against this package,” Graham said on the Senate floor on Sunday, a day after the former president said at a rally that he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that did not spend enough on defense.

Oswald enthusiastically embraces the opportunity to do whatever dirty work Lear’s eldest daughter wants done. That he follows her orders is not a crime—after all, she’s his boss—but the pleasure and ego boost he gets out of doing so is what marks him a villain. He enjoys insulting Lear and, later, enthusiastically embraces the opportunity to kill the blind Gloucester.

It is this enthusiasm for groveling that invites a comparison with Graham, who has done everything possible to ingratiate himself to Trump. This has even included lying about Trump’s golfing prowess, something we normally expect from North Koreans praising Kim Jong Un. (At one point Graham tweeted, “President Trump shot a 73 in windy and wet conditions!”) As a U.S. senator, Graham has less of an excuse than either North Koreans or Oswald.

Standing in dramatic contrast to Oswald is Kent, who is willing to speak truth to power, even at the cost of his job. When Lear banishes Cordelia, Kent comes “between a dragon and his wrath,” warning the king that he is making a mistake:

Kent:                                  [B]e Kent unmannerly,
When Lear is mad. What wilt thou do, old man?
Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound,
When majesty stoops to folly. 

When Lear threatens him, Kent replies,

My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive.

Kent has sworn an oath to kingship as Graham has sworn an oath to the Constitution, which is why he stands up to the king. Therefore when Kent, now disguised so that he can continue serving Lear, sees someone willing to abandon all integrity, he sees red and challenges Oswald to a duel:

Kent: Draw, you rascal: you come with letters against the king; and take vanity the puppet’s part against the royalty of her father: draw, you rogue, or I’ll so carbonado your shanks: draw, you rascal; come your ways.

I’m sure I’m far from the only one who would like to unload on Graham as Kent unloads on Oswald. I’ll conclude today’s post with Kent’s ringing denunciation:

Kent: Fellow, I know thee.
Oswald: What dost thou know me for?
Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

One that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service? A composition of knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch? I couldn’t have said it better.

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