Remembering 9-11 in Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: September 9, 2021

Friday

Reposted with modifications from September 10, 2016

On September 11, 2001 and for six days afterwards, Lucille Clifton wrote poems exploring the attack. In other words, for a week she used poetry as a daily meditation to process what had happened.

At the time, Lucille was a colleague of mine at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and we have posted all of them on plaques around St. John’s Pond, which sits in the middle of our campus. As one walks around the pond, one can read the sequence in its entirety.

The first poem turns on its head what it means to believe that God has blessed America. Often Americans assert that we are blessed because, as a wealthy and safe country, we are “exempt” from the suffering experienced “in otherwheres/israel ireland palestine.” Clifton notes that, with the attacks, we received a different kind of blessing, one that is in line with Jesus reaching out to the wretched of the earth: God has blessed us with the knowledge of what these “otherwheres” regularly experience:

1 Tuesday 9/11/01

thunder and lightning and our world
is another place no day
will ever be the same no blood
untouched

they know this storm in otherwheres
israel ireland palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing

and God has blessed America
to learn that no one is exempt
the world is one all fear
is one all life all death
all one

In Wednesday’s poem, Clifton reminds us that Muslims no less than Christians are God’s children. God has multiple names and many tongues. This is not the time to focus on divisiveness, she says, either anger against Muslims or anger against those targeting Muslims. This is a time to pray together under one flag, “warmed by the single love/ of the many tongued God.”

2 Wednesday 9/12/01

this is not the time
i think
to note the terrorist
inside
who threw the brick
into the mosque
this is not the time
to note
the ones who cursed
Gods other name
the ones who threatened
they would fill the streets
with arab children’s blood
and this is not the time
i think
to ask who is allowed to be
american America
all of us gathered under one flag
praying together safely
warmed by the single love
of the many tongued God

Thursday’s poem uses a passage from Genesis (28:12) to honor the firemen who gave their lives. There we read that, while dreaming, Jacob “saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.”

3 Thursday 9/13/01

the firemen
ascend
like jacob’s ladder
into the mouth of
history

Friday’s poem refers to the historical suffering of oppressed groups and passes along to all Americans an insight Clifton has struggled to learn as an African American woman: victims are not to blame for their suffering. While various rightwing preachers like Jerry Falwell said that the 9/11 attacks were in retribution for America’s toleration of homosexuality, Clifton reassures Americans that we have done nothing “to deserve such villainy.”

4 Friday 9/14/01

some of us know
we have never felt safe

all of us americans
weeping

as some of us have wept
before

is it treason to remember

what have we done
to deserve such villainy

nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing

Saturday’s poem invokes Jesus and asks whether there is a higher purpose at work in our suffering. Lucille wonders whether there will be miracles of love in store for us, even as she acknowledges that the intention of “the gods” is difficult to understand:

5 Saturday 9/15/01

i know a man who perished for his faith.
others called him infidel, chased him down
and beat him like a dog. after he died
the world was filled with miracles.
people forgot he was a jew and loved him.
who can know what is intended? who can understand
the gods?

Sunday’s poem is dedicated to Lucille’s new granddaughter, born five days before the attacks. As she looks over the St. Mary’s River that flows by our campus, Lucille is struck by the calm, which is in marked contrast with the attacks. While she is well aware of humanity’s history of injustice and the many reasons to hate—she is “cursed with long memory”—she chooses to love instead.

Her granddaughter, she notes, is born innocent into a violent world. While Bailey will become aware of the bad, however, she will also become cognizant of the good. Buoyed by new life, Lucille talks about how she loves all of the world, despite “the hatred and fear and tragedy.” Ultimately, love trumps all.

6 Sunday Morning 9/16/01
for bailey

the st. marys river flows
as if nothing has happened

i watch it with my coffee
afraid and sad as are we all

so many ones to hate and i
cursed with long memory

cursed with the desire to understand
have never been good at hating

now this new granddaughter
born into a violent world

as if nothing has happened

and i am consumed with love
for all of it

the everydayness of bravery
of hate of fear of tragedy

of death and birth and hope
true as this river

and especially with love
bailey fredrica clifton goin

for you

It so happened that Rosh Hashanah fell upon September 17 in 2001, prodding Lucille to find symbolic significance in the Jewish new year and the supposed anniversary of Adam and Eve. While human evil emerged from the Garden of Eden, so did human love. Lucille writes that “what is not lost” from that original connection with God “is paradise.” In the sweet and delicious image of “apples and honey,” we see that Lucille believes that not all has been lost:

7 Monday Sundown 9/17/01

Rosh Hashanah

i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate

i bear witness to no thing
more human than love

apples and honey
apples and honey

what is not lost
is paradise

And so we continue on, finding something to salvage in even the grimmest of times.

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Eliot Explains Conspiracy Theories

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2021
Pam Ferris as Mrs. Dollop, spreader of conspiracy theories

Thursday

A great literary tweet comes to us from one David Baddiel, who shares a Middlemarch passage that explains how conspiracy theories take hold. Author George Eliot, he says, nails it in the following passage:

But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

It so happens that, unlike many QAnon conspiracy theories, the one in Middlemarch has some basis in fact. The wealthy man Bulstrode has an actual scandal in his past and has found a way to do away with a man who has been blackmailing him over it. Nevertheless, fact soon morphs into something more fantastical:

Even the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode’s earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.

The innocent victim of this conspiracy theory is Lydgate, an idealistic and accomplished doctor who is trying to reform the medical profession. How he becomes linked with the wealthy Bulstrode is complicated, but all you need to know here is that he is an unknowing accomplice to Bulstrode murdering the blackmailer. When Bulstrode goes down, so does Lydgate, along with his lofty dreams. He dwindles into a conventional doctor ministering to rich people with gout in seaside resorts.

While today’s conspiracy theories take hold via the internet, in Victorian England they are spread through tavern gossip. Mrs. Dollop, “the spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane,” is one of those pouring lively metal into dialogue so that they take fantastic shapes. Time and again, she must correct those who want to stick to facts. As Eliot puts it, she

had often to resist the shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think that their reports from the outer world were of equal force with what had “come up” in her mind. How it had been brought to her she didn’t know, but it was there before her as if it had been “scored with the chalk on the chimney-board—”

When someone points out to her that she’s attributing a quotation she read in a newspaper to Bulstrode, she’s not deterred. Just as QAnon believers have a way around every difficulty, Mrs. Dollop says, “If one raskill said it, it’s more reason why another should.”

With such reasoning, what chance does truth have? As Mark Twain once wrote, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” The problem with our current lies is that they are killing people, leading them to reject healing vaccines and instead ingest livestock dewormers.

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Hurricane Ida and Murakami’s 1Q84

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2021
Hurricane Ida hits the New York subway

Wednesday

Last week, as I was watching news reports of Hurricane Ida hammering the east coast, one image in particular caught my attention: New York’s subway system filling with water. In Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84, a supernatural squall, triggered by the anger of “the Little People” (more on them in a moment) submerges a Tokyo subway station. Hang on while I apply the novel to the current climate crisis.

Aomame, a female fitness instructor who assassinates men who batter women, has just killed the cult leader of a fanatical sect who rapes little girls. Because the leader is the conduit for dark supernatural forces, embodied in a mysterious group of dwarfs, those dwarfs erupt in one last spasm of anger. Their target is the subway station where Aomame has stored her getaway bag. She is on her way there when she hears about the torrential downpour:

“Wasn’t that thunder something?” the driver said. “And the rain was incredible.”

And further on:

I hear the water in the streets overflowed and ran down into the Akasaka-Mitsuke subway station onto the tracks. It was because the rain all fell in one small area. They stopped the Ginza Line and the Marunouchi Line. I heard it on the radio news.

Aomame realizes that the Little People are trying to thwart her plans to escape. She barely manages to get her bag and get to her safe house before the cult is on her track.

The Little People, we learn, are behind the rage that leads men to batter women—and indeed, they are behind the deaths of Aomame’s two closest female friends. Once the cult loses their leader, they also lose touch with the Little People, which drives their search. As the leader explains to Aomame before she kills him, “the organization that I have created will never leave you alone…[T]hey will track you down and punish you severely. That is the kind of system that we have created: close-knit, violent, and irreversible.”

Murakami undoubtedly is basing the organization on Aleph, a Japanese doomsday cult and terrorist organization that carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995. In Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Murakami interviewed members of the cult and came to see them as expressions of a deep frustration with Japan’s materialistic society.

With the election of Donald Trump, America saw the rise of the largest cult in its history, and the fact that this cult is denying climate change, even as we witness increasing numbers of extreme weather events (including Hurricane Ida), makes Murakami’s novel relevant to our current situation. Although America has become more enlightened in certain areas—we elected a Black president, our scientists came up with a Covid cure, we can track the impact of our hydrocarbons—it has also become prey to dangerous conspiracy theories. As the leader explains about such a dichotomy,

Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow. Karl Jung said this about “the shadow” in one of his books: “It is as evil as we are positive…the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive….The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacy to be perfect, , the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil.

And further:

We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago—from a time before good and evil even existed, when people’s minds were still benighted.

But the leader then gives us reason to hope:

But the important thing is that, whether they are good or evil, light or shadow, whenever they begin to exert their power, a compensatory force comes into being.

In the case of 1Q84, the final compensatory force is Aomame’s love for Tengo, the novel’s other protagonist, as well the child they will have together. The cult wants that child, sensing it can be the new conduit for the voices, but Aomame and Tengo’s relationship proves to be more powerful than the forces of destruction.

So what will it be for our environment? Will the rage of the Little People prevail? Or will love, for each other and for the earth, win out?

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Atwood & Austen on Abortion in Texas

By Robin Bates | Published: September 6, 2021
A Polish protestor protests new Poland abortion ban

Tuesday

I still can’t believe the Supreme Court is allowing Texas to take away women’s abortion rights while encouraging its citizens to become bounty hunters, with $10,000 injury payments awaiting anyone who successfully snitches on anyone having, or aiding someone having, an abortion after six weeks. Many have been alluding to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in recent weeks, to which I add passages from George Orwell’s 1984 and, believe it or not, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. I’ll let Austen fans figure out the passage I have in mind as I turn to the more obvious passages first.

In The Handmaid’s Tale citizens, as in Texas, are deputized to carry out “justice,” such as when the handmaids must tear apart an alleged rapist with their bare hands (the man is actually a freedom fighter). Abortionists in Gilead, meanwhile, are hanged, even if they performed the operation when abortion was still legal. Even more relevant to the Texas situation, however, is the way Gilead turns neighbors into spies.

What if a boyfriend, for instance, after helping his girlfriend get an abortion, breaks up with her? If the break-up is contentious, might he turn her in? What about friends who drift apart? Or neighbors you think you can trust? Given the market incentives ($10,000 plus court expenses), how deep does loyalty go? And what will this do to communities?

In Handmaid’s Tale, protagonist Offred doesn’t know if she can trust Nick, the friendly chauffeur who works for her owner:

He looks at me, and sees me looking [at him smoking]. He has a French face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases around the mouth where he smiles. He takes a final puff of the cigarette, lets it drop to the driveway, and steps on it. He begins to whistle. Then he winks.

I drop my head and turn so that the white wings hide my face, and keep walking. He’s just taken a risk, but for what? What if I were to report him?

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

Perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do.

Perhaps he is an Eye.

Then there is Ofglen, a fellow handmaiden:

We aren’t allowed to go [to town] except in twos. This is supposed to be for our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy and I am hers.

It so happens that both the chauffeur and Ofglen can be trusted, but Offred initially has no way of knowing that. Making a mistake could get her imprisoned or killed. At least in Texas, it’s only $10,000 plus court expenses.

In 1984, sometimes family members turn one in, which we can well imagine happening in our polarized society where families sometimes fracture over politics. What if your sibling–or your children–think they are doing God’s will by betraying you?

The children…were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

This is the potential situation that the Supreme Court left in place, undoubtedly because at least five members (and maybe Roberts as well) want to see abortion outlawed. Their politics, not the law, prevailed. After all, would these conservative justices have allowed a state law to stand if vigilante citizens were incentivized to take to court anyone who owned a gun?

And now to Jane Austen. In Northanger Abbey’s most curious passage, Henry Tilney reprimands Catherine Morland for suspecting his father of having killed or imprisoned his mother. Because Catherine has been overly influenced by the gothic novels she is reading, Tilney brings her down to earth by pointing out that England has a neighborhood spy system that would prevent the general from having gotten away with any such thing:

If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?

We may not think ourselves as living in a country surrounded by voluntary spies but Texas is apparently trying to get us there. Suddenly, our laws are conniving at such a situation, which neither our education nor our sense of the probable has prepared us for.

Another literary allusion: Singer Bette Midler just tweeted out an Aristophanes reference for the occasion:

I suggest that all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress.

In Lysistrata, the ploy brings together inveterate enemies Athens and Sparta. It’s worth a shot.

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A Day of Rest for the Working Class

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2021
Thomas Hart Benton

Labor Day

In observance of Labor Day, here’s a poem by that bounciest of poets, Robert Service. Although it’s a bit of a caricature of the working man, I like the way he talks of rest. Labor Day, after all, celebrates the workers by giving them a special day off. And they don’t even have to die to earn it.

Song of the Wage Slave

When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,
I hope that it won’t be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say.
And I hope that it won’t be heaven, with some of the parsons I’ve met —
All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget.
Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands;
Master, I’ve done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands —
Wrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich;
I’ve done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch.
I have used the strength Thou hast given, Thou knowest I did not shirk;
Threescore years of labor — Thine be the long day’s work.
And now, Big Master, I’m broken and bent and twisted and scarred,
But I’ve held my job, and Thou knowest, and Thou wilt not judge me hard.
Thou knowest my sins are many, and often I’ve played the fool —
Whiskey and cards and women, they made me the devil’s tool.
I was just like a child with money; I flung it away with a curse,
Feasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a harlot’s purse;
Then back to the woods repentant, back to the mill or the mine,
I, the worker of workers, everything in my line.
Everything hard but headwork (I’d no more brains than a kid),
A brute with brute strength to labor, doing as I was bid;
Living in camps with men-folk, a lonely and loveless life;
Never knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife.
A brute with brute strength to labor, and they were so far above —
Yet I’d gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of Love.
I, with the strength of two men, savage and shy and wild —
Yet how I’d ha’ treasured a woman, and the sweet, warm kiss of a child!
Well, ’tis Thy world, and Thou knowest. I blaspheme and my ways be rude;
But I’ve lived my life as I found it, and I’ve done my best to be good;
I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes,
Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes;
Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams;
Down in the ditch building o’er me palaces fairer than dreams;
Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen,
Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men.
Master, I’ve filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands;
Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.
Master, I’ve done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,
And the long, long shift is over … Master, I’ve earned it — Rest.

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Flow As You Feel the Surge in Your Body

By Robin Bates | Published: September 4, 2021
Three Gorges of Yangstze River

Spiritual Sunday

I love this poem by Arthur Sze, a Chinese American poet whose family immigrated to America in the 1930s fleeing the Japanese and stayed. Thus the memories of the Yangtze River are family memories, not his own. The poem in some ways works as a riddle only the riddle is the mystery of life, which means an answer can never be pinned down.

But we know that, if we do not pluck the apple from the tree, it will die on the branch. We must go searching, even if we never find this mysterious “it.” Sze doesn’t call it “God” because that word is too heavy and seems too definite, even though God is never definite. What he knows is that it’s in the capillaries of our lungs, “in a corpseburning on the Ganges,/ in rain splashing on banana leaves.”

The ever flowing river, like ever flowing life, captures its spirit. So does the ever spinning top, describing a cone as it gathers together past, present, future. Look for it “in the smell of an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.” Plato may inform us that the apple we know is only a shadow of the ideal form, but given that we can only know that apple that we see, taste, smell, and hold in our hand, that’s were we must go to find mystery.

The Unnamable River
By Arthur Sze

1
Is it in the anthracite face of a coal miner,
crystallized in the veins and lungs of a steel          
worker, pulverized in the grimy hands of a railroad engineer?
Is it in a child naming a star, coconuts washing
ashore, dormant in a volcano along the Rio Grande?

You can travel the four thousand miles of the Nile
to its source and never find it.
You can climb the five highest peaks of the Himalayas
and never recognize it.
You can gaze though the largest telescope
and never see it.

But it’s in the capillaries of your lungs.
It’s in the space as you slice open a lemon.
It’s in a corpse burning on the Ganges,
in rain splashing on banana leaves.

Perhaps you have to know you are about to die
to hunger for it. Perhaps you have to go
alone in the jungle armed with a spear
to truly see it. Perhaps you have to
have pneumonia to sense its crush.

But it’s also in the scissor hands of a clock.
It’s in the precessing motion of a top
when a torque makes the axis of rotation describe a cone:
and the cone spinning on a point gathers
past, present, future.

2
In a crude theory of perception, the apple you
see is supposed to be a copy of the actual apple,
but who can step out of his body to compare the two?
Who can step out of his life and feel
the Milky Way flow out of his hands? 

An unpicked apple dies on a branch:
that is all we know of it.
It turns black and hard, a corpse on the Ganges.
Then go ahead and map out three thousand mile of the Yantze;
walk each inch, feel its surge and
flow as you feel the surge and flow in your own body.

And the spinning cone of a precessing top
is a form of existence that gathers and spins death and life into one.
It is in the duration of words, but beyond words—
river river river, river river.
The coal miner may not know he has it.
The steel worker may not know he has it.
The railroad engineer may not know he has it.
But it is there. It is in the smell
of an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.

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Condemned to Read Dickens, Austen

By Robin Bates | Published: September 2, 2021
Cornelis Dusart, Seated Man Reading, Facing Right

Friday

I’m intrigued by a judgement handed down by a British judge recently against a college student who downloaded close to 70,000 white supremacist documents and bomb-making instructions. Ben John, a 21-year-old who formerly attended Leicester’s De Montfort University, will avoid a prison sentence if he reads works by Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and Hardy. Apparently Judge Timothy Spencer is requiring him to return to court every four months to be tested on his reading.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the judge, after making John promise not to research any more righwing material, asked him,

 “Have you read Dickens? Austen? Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.

The judge told John to return January 4 to

“tell me what you have read and I will test you on it. I will test you and if I think you are [lying to] me you will suffer.”

He then told John’s barrister, Harry Bentley: “He has by the skin of his teeth avoided imprisonment.”

 I have mixed feelings about this. First of all, given that John is a white supremacist, wouldn’t he benefit more from reading writers of color. How about Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Or Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia? Or Candice Cartie-Williams’s Queenie. All show the humanity of non-white Brits.

The judge, however, is coming out of the Matthew Arnold-F. R. Leavis tradition that the classics are the means to preserve civilization against the barbarians at the gates. Believing that John appears all too eager to join these barbarians, the judge is hoping to give him a counter tradition. Maybe he’s hoping that John will transform, like Sydney Carton, from a disaffected cynic into a selfless citizen. Maybe he’s hoping that he’ll become as civil as Elizabeth and Jane Bennet. How Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedyTwelfth Night figures in I have no idea unless anything by Shakespeare is meant to be civilizing.

Still, I worry about these particular suggestions. What if John sees the French revolutionaries in Tale of Two Cities as the UK’s people of color and himself as the heroic Sydney Caron, self-pityingly willing to martyr himself for what he sees as the greater good (which is to say, a white England). And what if he see immigrants and others destroying the Britain of Jane Austen, with its ordered class society presided over by refined gentry. The nostalgia for an idealized rural England free of foreign taint is one of the things that drives English fascists.

It has me wondering whether this judge would have handed down the same sentence to a British Muslim who downloaded jihadi pamphlets and bomb-making information. I won’t pre-judge him because I don’t know, but at the very least he can imagine this defendant as sharing a world view that is like his own. In his mind, John’s problem is that he hasn’t been socialized by the proper literature.

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Crane’s Reenactment of War’s Horrors

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2021
Attributed to Matthew Brady, Confederate soldier at St. Petersburg

Thursday

In his speeches about withdrawing from Afghanistan, Joe Biden has been making the point that we have outsourced our fighting, along with the suffering and the dying, to a tiny minority of Americans. While evading the pain of war ourselves, we have been all too ready to let others take it on. This reality, along with the fact that the Afghan War was endless and unwinnable, lay behind the president’s decision to withdraw.

As I am one of those many Americans who knows virtually nothing about what service members undergo on the battlefield, I figured I should look into the matter. Fiction conveys such experiences far better than factual accounts so I turned to a novel that I have always intended to read, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.

I emerged from it with my eyes newly awakened to the horrors of war. Which I suspect was Crane’s intent.

Like many readers, I assumed as I read that Crane had seen action in the American Civil War. It so happens, however, that he was born five years after hostilities ended, in 1871. Such is the power of the imagination, however, that the author has convincingly entered the mind of a union soldier, getting us to feel the range of emotions that accompany live combat.

So that you can also experience those emotions, here are a few passages that stood out. In the first, the youth (as Crane calls him) encounters his first enemy corpse:

Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.

The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.

In a later scene, the youth surveys a field of corpses:

Under foot there were a few ghastly forms motionless. They lay twisted in fantastic contortions. Arms were bent and heads were turned in incredible ways. It seemed that the dead men must have fallen from some great height to get into such positions. They looked to be dumped out upon the ground from the sky.

And then there’s the moment when he is overtaken by battle frenzy and becomes a wild animal:

His fingers twined nervously about his rifle. He wished that it was an engine of annihilating power. He felt that he and his companions were being taunted and derided from sincere convictions that they were poor and puny. His knowledge of his inability to take vengeance for it made his rage into a dark and stormy specter, that possessed him and made him dream of abominable cruelties. The tormentors were flies sucking insolently at his blood, and he thought that he would have given his life for a revenge of seeing their faces in pitiful plights.

The winds of battle had swept all about the regiment, until the one rifle, instantly followed by others, flashed in its front. A moment later the regiment roared forth its sudden and valiant retort. A dense wall of smoke settled down. It was furiously slit and slashed by the knifelike fire from the rifles.

To the youth the fighters resembled animals tossed for a death struggle into a dark pit. There was a sensation that he and his fellows, at bay, were pushing back, always pushing fierce onslaughts of creatures who were slippery. Their beams of crimson seemed to get no purchase upon the bodies of their foes; the latter seemed to evade them with ease, and come through, between, around, and about with unopposed skill.

When, in a dream, it occurred to the youth that his rifle was an impotent stick, he lost sense of everything but his hate, his desire to smash into pulp the glittering smile of victory which he could feel upon the faces of his enemies.

And here his company witnesses a wounded comrade:

When their eyes first encountered him there was a sudden halt, as if they feared to go near. He was thrashing about in the grass, twisting his shuddering body into many strange postures. He was screaming loudly. This instant’s hesitation seemed to fill him with a tremendous, fantastic contempt, and he damned them in shrieked sentences.

Crane was a pioneer of literary naturalism, where the author depicts reality in minute detail and without moral judgment. To regain our human perspective, we as readers must wade in and provide the commentary ourselves.

When the book begins, the youth harbors dreams of glory. That dreaming is no more by the end of the three-day battle. “He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war,” Crane tells us. “He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks–an existence of soft and eternal peace.”

Wars must sometimes be fought, but leaders should first read books like The Red Badge of Courage in order to fully appreciate what they are asking of their citizens. They might wrestle more with their decision were they more aware of what is in store.

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Letting Others Clean Up Afghan Mess

By Robin Bates | Published: August 31, 2021
Edgerton, Mulligan as Tom and Daisy Buchanan

Wednesday

Here’s my understanding of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan: he believes American political leaders, military leaders, war hawks, foreign policy experts, military contractors, and others have been screwing up for 20 years and he didn’t want to follow their lead any longer. He called them on it in part because, as the father of a war vet himself, he didn’t want any more U.S. soldiers paying the price for the screw-up. He didn’t see any way to a clean withdrawal, which he regarded as a fairy tale in line with all the other fairy tales so-called experts have been touting about Afghanistan, and he preferred a messy withdrawal to no withdrawal at all.

In yesterday’s resolute speech, I almost expected him to quote the famous passage from The Great Gatsby:

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

Applying this particular mess to the Afghan War, our foreign policy establishment have been Daisy and Tom. As Daisy, they have been mowing down Myrtle Wilsons in the name of nation building. Now, as Tom, they are trying to persuade us that Joe Biden is the real culprit. Tom hints to Myrtle’s distraught husband that Gatsby is actually the one responsible for his wife’s death, thereby prompting him to gun down Gatsby, who was no more than an innocent witness. After all, if Gatsby can be pinned with the crime—if our Toms can persuade the American public to blame the man in the White House—then the Buchanans get to escape all accountability.

In blaming Gatsby and affirming his own innocence, Tom sounds perfectly reasonable. Nick observes,

There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.

When foreign policy experts tell you that Biden blew the withdrawal, don’t believe them until they have acknowledged the full complexity of the situation, including the fact that all those fighters that Trump released from imprisonment were prepared to start fighting Americans again if America didn’t withdraw from the country. Anything else is just Monday morning quarterbacking mixed with a fair amount of buck passing.

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him,” Nick says, “but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.” 

Further thought: Washington Post liberal columnist Paul Waldman lists five self-serving fictions that Americans tell themselves about their military interventions, fictions that have are no more true that Tom Buchanan’s lie about Gatsby. There are:

–U.S. wars are just and noble, undertaken for all the right reasons

–People in other countries appreciate that our motives are good.

–Our anger is righteous and deserved; anyone else’s is not

–If we don’t demonstrate “strength” and “resolve” there will be more terrorism

–The tools we use to force other countries to bend to our will, including but not limited to military power, are effective

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