Beowulf Biden Steps Down

By Robin Bates | Published: July 21, 2024
Joe Biden announces he is stepping down

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Monday

Three weeks ago I made a “Beowulfian Case for Keeping Joe Biden.” The post focused on how the poem explores the problem of dragon kings, a serious issue in king-dependent warrior society. I noted that there are three different kinds of kings that show up in this drama: kings who lash out at those around them, kings who become depressed and retreat into themselves, and kings shoulder all their society’s burdens, thereby disempowering those around them.

Heremod is the most noteworthy of the paranoid kings and the one who most resembles Donald Trump. The poem describes him as follows:

He vented his rage on men he caroused with,
killed his own comrades, a pariah king
who cut himself off from his own kind,
even though Almighty God had made him
eminent and powerful and marked him from the start
for a happy life. But a change happened,
he grew bloodthirsty, gave no more rings 
to honor the Danes.

Among the depressed kings is Hrethel, who retreats into his bed after his eldest son is killed in a hunting accident and never recovers; the “last veteran,” who withdraws into a funeral barrow with all his wealth after having lost everyone around him; and potentially the Danish king Hrothgar, whom Beowulf has to pull out of gloom after his best friend is killed by Grendel’s Mother.

Beowulf is the best of these dragon kings and the one who most resembles Biden.  Here’s what I wrote in my previous post:

Beowulf has had a spectacularly successful 50-year reign, but when dragonhood begins to descend, he makes what some consider to have been Biden’s mistake. Instead of passing the kingdom along to a successor, he insists on remaining king, thinking that only he can defeat the foe. Biden, some of his critics have charged, thinks that only he can defeat Trump, while Beowulf thinks the same about the dragon. As he instructs his warriors,

Men at arms, remain here on the barrow, 
safe in your armor, to see which one of us
is better in the end at bearing wounds
in a deadly fray. This fight is not yours,
nor is it up to any man except me
to measure his strength against the monster
or to prove his worth. I shall win the gold
by my courage, or else mortal combat,
doom of battle, will bear your lord away.  

One reason for Beowulf’s confidence, and for Biden’s, is his past record. And yes, there is some hubris involved. Thinking that one can defeat the dragon by oneself is itself a dragon trait:

Beowulf spoke, made a formal boast
for the last time: “I risked my life 
often when I was young. Now I am old,
but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight
for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only
abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open.”

Beowulf is able to go out a hero, not a dragon, because he accepts help from another. His nephew Wiglaf disregards his order to stay away and wades into the battle, distracting the dragon enough that Beowulf is able to kill it. In my post, I argued that Biden is surrounded by Wiglafs—the presidency is not a one-person job, after all—and I thought that the quality people that Biden has chosen in his administration and the competent state administrators that come to power because of his sterling presidency could carry us through. It did not matter, I believed, that Biden had lost a step. As I saw it, the advantages of incumbency outweighed the fact that he has lost a step.

But I suppose we could also see, as Wiglafs, those who persuaded the president to step down. If they are right—if Kamala Harris stands a better chance of saving American democracy than Biden—then they should be seen as heroes in their own right. Willing to brave Biden’s dragon fire, they pressured him to do the right thing, saving Biden from dragonhood. As Tom Nichols of Atlantic puts it,

My colleague Franklin Foer (who has written a biography of Biden) noted today that the Biden of the past few weeks was a less than admirable figure: He was a defensive, brittle old man who didn’t want to be told he could no longer lead the party on the field of political battle. 

And then the heroic part:

Biden’s decision reflected a determination to put the fate of his country ahead of his personal vanity, a choice Trump is inherently incapable of making.  

These Wiglafs had better be right, however—because if they are not and if Democrats lose an election they could have won, then we will face a version of what happens to Beowulf’s people. Wiglaf forecasts the future, which he’s able to do fairly accurately as the poet, looking back at the time the poem is set, knows that the Geats will eventually be vanquished by the Swedes:

Now War is looming
over our nation, soon it will be known
to Franks and Frisians, far and wide,
that the king is gone….
Nor do I expect peace or pact-keeping
of any sort from the Swedes.
[T]hey will cross our borders
and attack in force when they find out
that Beowulf is dead.

But not to end on a dark note, here’s the wealth that Beowulf and Wiglaf, working together, liberate through their joint effort:

[Wiglaf] saw beyond the seat
a treasure-trove of astonishing richness, 
wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold,
glittering gold spread across the ground, 
the old dawn-scorching serpent’s den
packed with goblets and vessels from the past…

And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold,
hanging high over the hoard,
a masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light 
so he could make out the ground at his feet
and inspect the valuables.

The policies that Biden set in motion and that Harris will continue has made America the economic envy of the world. Isolationist Trump, with his anti-immigrant threats and his promise of billionaire tax cuts, hunkers down in an America that he wants to turn into a dragon’s cave.

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Hearing the Celestial Voices

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2024
Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem, The Annunciation to the Shepherds

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Sunday

As two of today’s lectionary readings employ the shepherd metaphor, as does the psalm, I share two poems about shepherds. To set them up, here’s Jeremiah decrying Israel’s bad leaders:

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.

And now Jesus:

As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.

We’ll also be reading the 23rd psalm, which you all know and which is one of the Bible’s great poems. I always prefer the gorgeous King James version, in part because my sophomore English teacher had us memorize it in the Episcopalian prep school that I attended:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

The sense of peace in the face of adversity is one of the striking aspects of the psalm. William Blake taps into this same well of comfort in “The Shepherd,” which appears in Songs of Innocence:

How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays;
He shall follow his sheep all the day,
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.

For he hears the lambs’ innocent call,
And he hears the ewes’ tender reply;
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their shepherd is nigh.

Note the shift in focus from the shepherd who worships to the sheep who know “when their shepherd is nigh.” As the psalmist puts it, “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

Poet Malcolm Guite alerted me to the second poem, which is by Richard Bauckman. In “The Song of the Shepherds,” the shepherds recall the light they witnessed when Jesus was born, describing it as

a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.

Since then, however, they have seen only darkness:

Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold.

The use of the word “clutch” signals that the poet is referencing T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where the wisemen feel similarly bereft in the years since they witnessed the miraculous birth:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

Here’s Bauckman’s poem

The Song of the Shepherds
By Richard Bauckman

We were familiar with the night.
We knew its favorite colors,
its sullen silence
and its small, disturbing sounds,
its unprovoked rages,
its savage dreams.
 
We slept by turns,
attentive to the flock.
We said little.
Night after night, there was little to say.
But sometimes one of us,
skilled in that way,
would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
 
They say that once, almost before time,
the stars with shining voices
serenaded
the new born world.
The night could not contain their boundless praise.

We thought that just a poem —
until the night
a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.
 
Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meager cloaks against the cold.
Our aging piper’s fumbling fingers play,
night after night,
an earthly echo of the song that banished dark.
It has stayed with us.

Although they are clutching their meager cloaks against the dark cold, the shepherds can still hear the celestial music, even if only faintly, and they attempt to echo it with fumbling fingers. The idea that one can catch only a glimpse of revelation is also an Eliot theme, such as is to be found in “The Hollow Men.” Seeking for the souls in Dante’s Paradiso, the hollow speaker hears only voices

In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

A more positive way to think of this revelation, however—one that points a way forward toward hope—can be found in Lucille Clifton’s poem “the man who killed the bear.” Remembering, at news of her father’s death, how he sexually abused her when a child, Clifton reveals her way of dealing with the darkness. Speaking to the moon, which witnessed the crime but did nothing, she notes that she is not entirely without aid. When she recalls that the moon “catches the sun and keeps most of him/ for the evening that surely will come/ and it comes,” she writes,

only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.

Distant recollection of the song of solar glory, in other words, does not merely stay with her, as it does with Bauckman’s shepherds. It leads to joyful celebration.

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Tourist Reenacts Euripides’s Bacchae

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2024
Worshipping Giambologna’s Bacchus (Bargello Museum, Florence)

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Friday

My English professor son Toby, who knows me very well, recently alerted me to a CNN article that put us in mind of Euripides’s 405 BCE play The Bacchae. Here’s the headline:

Italian officials slam tourist who ‘mimicked sex acts’ on a statue of Bacchus in Florence

If you want further graphic evidence, click on the link, which shows two shots of a young woman “kissing, humping and grinding” against Giambologna’s 1560 statue of the god of wine and sensuality. Whether or not you find it shocking, it’s thoroughly in the spirit of Dionysus’s followers. Here’s Euripides’s account of the Bacchae worshipping their god:

Oh, Thebes, Semele’s nurse,
crest your walls with ivy.
Burst into greenness, burst
into a blaze of bryony [ivy],
take up the bacchanalian beat
with branches of oak and of fir,
cover your flesh with fawnskin
fringed with silver-white fleece
and lifting the fennel,
touch God
in a fit of sanctified frenzy.
Then all at once the whole land will dance!
Bacchus will lead the dancing throngs to the mountain,
the mountain,
which is home to that mob of women,
who rebelled against shuttle and loom
answer the urge of Dionysus.

And further on:

Your ground flows with milk,
flows with wine, flows with nectar from the bees.
Like smoke from a Syrian incense,
the fragrant God arises with his torch of pine.
He runs, he dances in a whirl of flame,
he rouses the faithful
crazing their limbs with his roar,
while he races the wind,
his soft hair streaming behind.
And his call resounds like thunder:
“Go, my Bacchae, go!
Let Tmolus with its golden streams
reverberate with songs of Dionysus,
and the vibrant crash of drums.
Sing out in joy
with loud Phrygian cries,
while the holy sweet-throated flute
climbs the holy scale and the scaling maenads climb
up the mountain,
up the mountain.”

And finally, in a lovely conclusion:

It is then, that a girl like me
knows happiness. When she is free,
like a filly playfully prancing
around its mother,
in fields without fences.

Predictably, Italy’s culture ministry and Florence officials “have expressed their fury over the incident after pictures went viral on social media, with the Florence mayor’s office calling it an act that ‘mimicked sex.’” If they identify the young woman, whom they are presuming was inebriated at the time, they are threatening to ban her from the city for life.

Their reactions are not unlike those of Pentheus, king of Thebes, when he returns home from a voyage and discovers that his mother and aunts have all gone out to join the Bacchae:

Our women, I am told, have left their homes,
in a religious trance—what travesty!–
and scamper up and down the wooded mountains, dancing
in honor of this new-fangled God, Dionysus,
whoever he may be.
In the middle of each female group
of revelers, I hear,
stands a jar of wine, brimming! And that taking turns,
they steal away, one here, one there, to shady nooks,
where they satisfy the lechery of men,
pretending to be priestesses,
performing their religious duties. Ha!
That performance reeks more of Aphrodite
than of Bacchus.

And further on:

Take my word,
when women are allowed to feast on wine, there is no telling
to what lengths their filthy minds will go!

King Pentheus first shackles the women and Dionysus and then, after Dionysus breaks the chains and destroys the prison, turns voyeur and sneaks out to watch the women. (in other words, he’s like those “family values” politicos who are revealed to have slept around and/or paid for abortions.) As one witness reports, the Bacchae are quite a sight:

First, they let their hair fall down their shoulders
and those whose fawnskins had come loose
fastened them up, while others girdled theirs
with snakes that licked their cheeks. Some,
mothers with newborn babies left at home,
cradled young gazelles or wild wolf cubs in their arms
and fed them at their full-blown breasts
that brimmed with milk.
They they wreathed their heads with shoots
of ivy, oak and flowering bryony.

When they discover the peeping Tom, however, the women turn savage and proceed to rip Pentheus apart. Try to impose strict controls over women’s sexuality and women’s bodies, in other words, and they’ll react with fury.

Hmm, maybe the Supreme Court, J.D. Vance, and Trump’s GOP should take note.

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J.D. Vance Dreams of Gilead

By Robin Bates | Published: July 17, 2024

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Thursday

I’m wondering, in thinking about my forthcoming book Better Living through Literature (release date August 22), whether I should have spent more time talking about Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. This classic work of dystopian or speculative fiction (Atwood prefers the latter description) is increasingly proving its worth at clarifying the misogyny that is at work in certain parts of our culture.

Trump choosing J.D. Vance to be his running mate makes the novel even more timely given that Vance, amazingly, is even worse than Trump when it comes to women. Or at least, policies concerning women. (Trump has him beat in the rape department.) Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg describes Vance  as coming out of “the pro-Putin, pro-oligarch, Handmaid’s Tale wing of the GOP,” while Trump niece Mary Trump noted that “American women will know misery if by some great tragedy Donald and Vance get into the White House because those two will make The Handmaid’s Tale our reality.”

Among the extremist positions Vance has taken concerning women are the following:

–that women should remain in abusive marriages:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

–that there should be an end to no-fault divorce on the grounds that it “undermines family stability”;

–that there should be no abortion exceptions for rape or incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right”:

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient” (my italics).

–that the police should have access to the records of women who cross state lines to have abortions:

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Donald Trump’s pick for vice presidential nominee, pressured federal regulators last June to kill a privacy rule that prevents police from accessing the medical records of people seeking reproductive services, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. The rule was designed to prevent state and local police in anti-abortion states from using private records to hunt down and prosecute people who cross state lines in search of abortion services.

–that there shouldn’t be a federal right to accessing contraception or in vitro fertilization (he, along with most Republican members of Congress, voted against Democratic attempts to protect these rights);

–that women shouldn’t choose career over motherhood:

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”

–that women are effectively running and ruining the country. Vance describes these women as

 a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. and its just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

—-that there should be some sort of national abortion ban:

I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions. But I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”

It’s clear why he would want such a “minimum national standard” given that he sees “something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children.”

As Jessica Valenti, who runs the blog Abortion, Every Day has put it,

Vance’s anti-abortion beliefs are driven by a broader desire for traditional gender norms and a world where women didn’t have choices about anything, not just their bodies. Like so many men obsessed with the “trad” movement, however, Vance shrouds his old-school misogyny as concern for women’s happiness.

So could Trump and Vance impose such a country on us? In Atwood’s novel, Gilead comes to power in part because of complacency, with people figuring that their own lives will not be impacted. While the narrator notes that, in the days before the fundamentalist takeover, there were some reports of atrocities by Christian terrorists—just as we have seen multiple mass shootings by rightwing gunmen—the women in Atwood’s novel shrug them off as involving “other women”:

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual…We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

There’s a reason why conservative school boards throughout the country are banning Handmaid’s Tale. And why it’s important to get the novel into as many hands as possible. And to vote blue.

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A New Trump Is Like a New Pap Finn

By Robin Bates | Published: July 16, 2024
Illus. from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Wednesday

Hope springs eternal in the hearts of certain journalists and political moderates when it comes to Trump. For years they told themselves he would grow into the presidency, and now they are hoping that his recent brush with death will soften him up. For instance, journalist Elliott Ackerman recently wrote in an Atlantic piece, “Trump has called his enemies ‘bad people’ in the past, but now he’s suffered a near death experience. Sometimes, that changes people.”

To which Digby of the blog Hullabaloo, referring to the Alan Sorkin television series about an idealized president, sarcastically replied, “I loved the West Wing so much.”

And then there’s this from Axios:

[H]e could unify America. Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility. Imagine him telliing the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language–and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.

After all we’ve seen of Donald Trump, to think that he would suddenly put country first is delusional. He’s more likely to respond like Hitler, who after the bomb attempt on his life just became more erratic, paranoid, and unhinged.  The literary passage that comes to my mind when encountering such fantasizing is the attempt to reform Pap in Huckleberry Finn.

Pap is back in town after learning that Huck and Tom have chanced upon a treasure and is threatening to “cowhide” Huck “till I was black and blue.” Judge Thatcher and the Widow Watkins go to the local judge to see if one of them can become his guardian, but the judge is a “family values” kind of man. (He’s reminiscent of Trump’s V-P pick, who believes that women should remain in abusive marriages.) Being new in town and not knowing Pap, he states that

courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he’d druther not take a child away from its father. So Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business.

The new judge then follows up his decision with action, determining to “make a man” of Pap:

So he took him to his own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family, and was just old pie to him, so to speak. And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he’d been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was a-going to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn’t be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him. The judge said he could hug him for them words; so he cried, and his wife she cried again; pap said he’d been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said he believed it. The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so; so they cried again.

Then we get Pap delivering his version of Trump’s promise to focus on unifying the country:

[W]hen it was bedtime the old man rose up and held out his hand, and says:

“Look at it, gentlemen and ladies all; take a-hold of it; shake it. There’s a hand that was the hand of a hog; but it ain’t so no more; it’s the hand of a man that’s started in on a new life, and’ll die before he’ll go back. You mark them words—don’t forget I said them. It’s a clean hand now; shake it—don’t be afeard.”

So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried. The judge’s wife she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledge—made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room…

So how does it work out? About as you’d expect:

…and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up. And when they come to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could navigate it.

It appears that Trump isn’t doing much better. Two days after the shooting, he was on Truth Social giving his version of unifying the country–which is that everyone should do what he wants:

As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida [by judge Aileen Cannon] would be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts–the January 6 Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponents, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted, “He appears to be once again calling E Jean Carroll a liar in his ‘unity’ statement.” Trump is already on the hook for $83.3 million for defaming Carroll.

One wonders whether fantasizing journalists will wake up to reality as quickly as Pap’s reformist judge does:

The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way.

Given the current climate, I suppose I must add that the judge is joking. The only way to reform Donald Trump—or at least bring an end to his behavior—is to defeat him at the voting booth and hold him accountable in the courts.

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Borges on Conspiracy Theories

By Robin Bates | Published: July 15, 2024
Jorge Luis Borges


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Tuesday

It’s amazing how crazed narratives flourish when truth is whatever you decide it is. QAnon was the first inkling I got of how a significant swatch of the electorate would buy into unhinged conspiracy theories so it has come as no surprise that Republican politicos are blaming Democrats and Biden for the Trump shooting. And doing so even though the shooter was (wait for it) a white kid who hung out with conservative classmates in high school, had access to his libertarian father’s AR-15 style assault weapon, belonged to a shooting club, wore a T-shirt from Demolition Ranch (a YouTube channel known for its firearms and demolition content), and was a registered Republican.

Nevertheless, at least 30 Republican members of Congress are now on record blaming either Biden, the Democrats, or the media for the shooting.

Conspiracy theories can go in multiple directions, as Jorge Luis Borges was well aware. In two of his short stories, he looks at the dynamics at work, showing in “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” how people will create fraudulent scenarios to serve their purposes and in “Death and the Compass” how they can get trapped in their own theorizing. More on Borges in a moment.

First of all, however, here’s a taste of this theorizing from the man that I correctly predicted (with help from Lady Bracknell) would be Trump’s choice for V-P. While I credit Vance’s two billionaire backers, Peter Thiel and Edmund Musk, for the selection, some have speculated that Trump liked how Vance blamed Biden for the shooting. As Vance tweeted,

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

Forget the shooter’s demographics, in other words. Reality for Vance is whatever he decrees it to be.

Now to Borges, who in “Traitor and Hero” imagines a 19th– century Irish revolutionary discovering that he himself is the traitor in his activist group (we’re not told how). He therefore asks to be executed in such a way that will advance the goals of the revolution. To make the death particularly dramatic and memorable, one of his fellow revolutionaries plagiarizes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth. The resulting story becomes one for the ages, the traitor is regarded as a hero, and the revolution succeeds.

There’s a further twist to the story but put that aside and think further about conspiracies. What’s to keep a liberal conspiracy theorist from arguing that Trump just set up the whole shooting so that he could strike a heroic pose from an embattled position, thereby boosting his election prospects? Or imagine our liberal conspiracy theorist contending that Trump, like the traitor/hero in the story, planned heroic martyrdom to advance the cause of Trumpism. (Okay, I suspect that even the most ardent Trumpists wouldn’t see their narcissistic leader capable to this degree of self -sacrifice.)

On to “Death and the Compass,” where a famed detective chooses an elaborate conspiracy theory over the obvious explanation about why a rabbi gets stabbed. The obvious explanation is that the thief was out to steal a renowned collection of sapphires but blundered into the wrong room. This is the police commissioner’s theory but detective Lônnrot, like Poe’s Dupin or Doyle’s Holmes, disagrees, saying that such a theory

is possible, but not interesting. You will reply that reality hasn’t the slightest need to be of interest. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.

It turns out that the police commissioner is right about a botched robbery. But in a further twist, the organized crime lord who ordered the robbery figures out the rabbinical explanation that Lönnrot is pursuing. He therefore feeds him fake clues to lead him on, luring him into a trap and ultimately shooting him.  Before he dies, the detective comments,

In your labyrinth there are three lines too many. I know of a Greek labyrinth [Zeno’s paradox] which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too.

To which his about-to-be killer replies, “The next time I kill you I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.”

So while Vance and others are spinning elaborate theories that blame Democrats, it is up to the rest of us to apply a single straight-line explanation. Actually, I can think of two. Either the shooter thought that Trump isn’t right wing enough or he was a mixed-up kid looking for notoriety.

(I mention that first explanation, not because I have any idea about its accuracy, but to make the point that it’s more plausible than any we’re getting from MAGA.)

So will Republicans get trapped in their own theories the way that Lönnrot does? Well, do you think shouting nonsensical claims at the top of your lungs is going to win over those independent voters that Trump needs to swing the election? Perhaps Trumpists convince themselves they are winning because they can’t hear anyone but themselves, but keep in mind that, ever since 2018—when they started doubling down on Trumpism—they have been losing elections. And this in spite of their heavy gerrymandering and voter suppression. As the kids say, they keep getting high on their own stash.

In my post about James Stephens’s “Sea Shell” last week, I contended that Biden’s common sense and decency, delivered in calm and measured tones, will ultimately be what most voters want. The address he gave following the Trump shooting was another instance of his reasonableness. So when hysterics such as Trump and Vance—Vance even more than Trump—are threatening to send women and LGBTQ+ folk back to the 1950s and unions back to the 1980s, do we really think Americans are going to go for it? Especially when there’s a grown-up in the White House who keeps insisting we keep our eyes on the prize? Maybe Trump is fun reality tv for a while but, in good economic times, you can always count on the American electorate to choose comfort and stability over chaos. And the incumbent over the challenger.

In Borges’s story, Lönnrot is far more interesting than the police commissioner. The commissioner, however, has a better understanding of how the world works.

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GOP Veepstakes and Pope’s Dunciad

By Robin Bates | Published: July 14, 2024
J.D. Vance and Donald Trump

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Monday

As many predicted, Donald Trump is treating his vice-presidential pick like an episode on The Apprentice, with the additional advantage (for him) as having candidates grovel before him a little longer. What comes to my mind is the degree to which the dunces in Alexander Pope’s famous mock epic are willing to degrade themselves to get what they want.

Before turning to Pope, here’s what one of our own satirists–New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz—has to say about Trump’s veepstakes:

Now in the final stages of choosing a running mate, Donald J. Trump is screening potential picks for any troubling signs of self-esteem, a campaign staffer confirmed on Tuesday. 

“In terms of a total lack of self-worth, Mike Pence set the bar pretty high,” the staffer said. “If he had been willing to violate the Constitution he would’ve been a keeper.”

Borowitz comes up with two examples. J.D. Vance first:

According to the staffer, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio made a fatal error in a recent grilling session when he accidentally used the word “I” in Trump’s presence. 

“That indicated that he might have an identity of his own apart from Trump,” the staffer said. “Sadly, I think J.D.’s toast.”

And now Marco Rubio:

As the field narrows, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida appears to be leading in the self-debasement sweepstakes. 

“Trump insulted Rubio relentlessly in 2016 by calling him ‘Little Marco,’ and yet the senator is still desperate to be chosen,” the staffer says. “If he has even a shred of dignity, he’s done an amazing of job hiding it.”

The Dunciad was Pope’s takedown of the trash writers of his day. Parodying the epic games in The Aeneid, there are two self-abasing contests in particular that fit our situation. [Warning: Scatological humor ahead.]

The goddess Dulness creates a phantom poet who, because he appears rich and noble, is particularly sought after by the unscrupulous booksellers of the day, particularly Bernard Lintot and Edmund Curl. Both are willing to wade through piss and excrement to obtain the prize. Like the original scene in the Aeneid, one contestant slips, giving temporary advantage to the other. In this case, Curl slips in the contents of the chamber pot that his own chambermaid has emptied in front of Lintot’s bookstore (“fallen in the plash his wickedness had laid”):

Full in the middle way there stood a lake,
Which Curl’s Corinna chanc’d that morn to make,
(Such was her wont, at early down to drop
Her evening cates before his neighbor’s shop,)
Here fortun’d Curl to slide; loud shout the band,
And Bernard! Bernard! rings thro’ all the Strand. 
Obscene with filth the miscreant lies bewrayed
Fallen in the plash his wickedness had laid…

Rather than the filth and abasement slowing him down, however, it gives him extra force. It’s like the way that the Veep applicants seem to get special energy from Trump’s humiliations:

 Renew’d by ordure’s sympathetic force,
As oil’d with magic juices for the course,
Vigorous he rises; from the effluvia strong
Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along;
Repasses Lintot, vindicates the race,
Nor heeds the brown dishonors of his face.

The second contest fits our purposes even better because it involves political hacks. Whoever can dive the deepest into London’s sewer system (Fleet Ditch, formerly the Fleet River) will get the sought-after prize. In this case, the prize is added publicity, achieved through bound magazines, along with a pound of lead. Once again, the goddess Dulness is presiding over the contest and addresses the contestants:

                         [All descend]
To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The king of dikes! than whom no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood.
“Here strip, my children! here at once leap in,
Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin,
And who the most in love of dirt excel,
Or dark dexterity of groping well.
Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around
The stream, be his the weekly journals bound…”

We get differing descriptions of the different dives into the muck. I haven’t paid so much attention to how the various Veep-candidates have been abasing themselves to match them up with the different dunces. Perhaps the first is like Vance, who after gaining a certain amount of fame through his book and then his business acumen, in that he climbs high in order to sink low. Here’s how Pope describes this dunce:

 [He] climb’d a stranded lighter’s height,
Shot to the black abyss, and plunged downright.
The senior’s judgment all the crowd admire,
Who but to sink the deeper, rose the higher.   

Another, one William Arnall, is particularly active in the dirty crab dance, which is to climb by going downward and advancing by going backward. Which brings Marco Rubio to mind:

 Not so bold Arnall; with a weight of skull,
Furious he dives, precipitately dull.
Whirlpools and storms his circling arm invest,
With all the might of gravitation bless’d.
No crab more active in the dirty dance,
Downward to climb, and backward to advance.
He brings up half the bottom on his head,
And loudly claims the journals and the lead.

Yet another contestant returns to sing the praises of swimming in, well, liquid shit, describing how brown sea nymphs have catered to him. Feel free to imagine here V-P aspirant and South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who perhaps surpasses everyone in talking about the seductive pleasures of Donald Trump. Hylas in the passage was a youth in Greek myth who was kidnapped and ravished by water nymphs:

First he relates, how sinking to the chin,
Smit with his mien, the mud-nymphs suck’d him in:
How young Lutetia, softer than the down,
Nigrina black, and Merdamante brown,
Vied for his love in jetty bowers below,
As Hylas fair was ravish’d long ago.

I’ve written in the past about how Winston Smith in 1984 learned to love Big Brother, all the more so because he was abused by him. I’m wondering if some similar psychology is at play with these Trump sycophants. Having once opposed Trump—and all have—perhaps they find a new kind of pleasure and release in surrendering to him completely.

The prize goes to him “who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around.” Of these finalists we can justly say, “No crabs more active in the dirty dance.”

Previous post on GOP Veepstakes
Who Is to Be Trump’s V-P? Lady Bracknell Knows

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Salomé: Material Girl in a Material World

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2024
Andrea Salorio, Salomé and the Head of John the Baptist

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Sunday

Today’s Gospel reading is the salacious story of Salomé, which has fascinated such artists as Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Strauss, and countless painters. While I’ve long been an Oscar Wilde enthusiast, I read his one-act play for the first time yesterday and am still processing it.

First, for those who need a reminder, here’s the story as Mark tells it:

For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For John had been telling Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. When his daughter Herodias [a.k.a. Salomé] came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.

In Wilde’s version it’s not Herodias the wife calling the shots but Salomé. Wilde has her fall in love with John out of what appears to be a spiritual hunger. As a material girl living in a material world, she is experiencing a terrifying lack. Either there are no gods (“The Romans have driven them out,” one character observes) or religion has become static and legalistic. Her father, meanwhile, is lecherous and her mother vengeful. No wonder she seeks out the imprisoned John the Baptist (a.k.a. Jokanaan):

How sweet the air is here! I can breathe here! Within there are Jews from Jerusalem who are tearing each other in pieces over their foolish ceremonies, and barbarians who drink and drink, and spill their wine on the pavement, and Greeks from Smyrna with painted eyes and painted cheeks, and frizzed hair curled in twisted coils, and silent, subtle Egyptians, with long nails of jade and russett cloaks, and Romans brutal and coarse, with their uncouth jargon. Ah! how I loathe the Romans! They are rough and common, and they give themselves the airs of noble lords.

Although the imprisoned John is foul and in rags, Salomé finds a deep beauty in him:

How wasted he is! He is like a thin ivory statue. He is like an image of silver. I am sure he is chaste as the moon is. He is like a moonbeam, like a shaft of silver. His flesh must be cool like ivory. I would look closer at him.

As a pampered princess, where she goes wrong is in thinking that what she longs for must be possessed. Her desire to kiss John becomes an obsession:

Salomé: It is thy mouth that I desire, Jokanaan. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate-flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets that herald the approach of kings, and make afraid the enemy, are not so red. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of those who tread the wine in the wine-press. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of the doves who haunt the temples and are fed by the priests. It is redder than the feet of him who cometh from a forest where he hath slain a lion, and seen gilded tigers. Thy mouth is like a branch of coral that fishers have found in the twilight of the sea, the coral that they keep for the kings!… It is like the vermilion that the Moabites find in the mines of Moab, the vermilion that the kings take from them. It is like the bow of the King of the Persians, that is painted with vermilion, and is tipped with coral. There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth…. Let me kiss thy mouth.

Jokanaan: Never! daughter of Babylon! Daughter of Sodom! Never.

Salomé: I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. I will kiss thy mouth.

Her young and handsome Syrian guard, who is in love with her, is so appalled at her preference that he kills himself. And she, when balked of her desire, chooses the only way she can think of to get what she wants:

Herod: What would you have them bring thee in a silver charger? Tell me. Whatsoever it may be, they shall give it you. My treasures belong to thee. What is it, Salomé?

Salomé [rising]: I ask of you the head of Jokanaan.

When Herod offers her anything else, from precious jewels to half his kingdom, she is resolute. After all, she has come to learn just how empty wealth and power are. Sadly, she does not realize that what she desires cannot be possessed. And this in spite of the fact that John has told her where she needs to look:

Salomé: Speak again! Speak again, Jokanaan, and tell me what I must do.

Jokanaan: Daughter of Sodom, come not near me! But cover thy face with a veil, and scatter ashes upon thine head, and get thee to the desert and seek out the Son of Man.

Salomé: Who is he, the Son of Man? Is he as beautiful as thou art, Jokanaan?

And later:

Salomé: Let me kiss thy mouth.

Jokanaan: Daughter of adultery, there is but one who can save thee, it is He of whom I spake. Go seek Him. He is in a boat on the sea of Galilee, and He talketh with His disciples. Kneel down on the shore of the sea, and call unto Him by His name. When He cometh to thee (and to all who call on Him He cometh), bow thyself at His feet and ask of Him the remission of thy sins.

Salomé’s tragedy is that she doesn’t follow John’s advice but, blinded by her material understanding of the world, destroys the only man who tells her about a way out. In the end, she is ordered killed by her horrified and uncomprehending father.

Previous posts on Salomé
Carol Anne Duffy: Salomé the Morning After
Anne Killigrew: Salomé, a Female Revenge Fantasy
Tim Winton: This House Is Filling with Light

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Politics Got You Down? Read Rasselas
By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2024
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Friday
Uncertainty about the 2024 election is driving Democrats mad at the moment. Why does the race continue so close, we wonder, given that Joe Biden has created a stellar economy while Donald Trump attempted a coup and is now—with his threats of retribution and Project 2025—promising a fascist takedown of American democracy if reelected? While the situation is worrisome, however, worrying ourselves sick over the matter is not going to change things.
When I find myself consumed by despair over this state of affairs, I sometimes think of Samuel Johnson’s astronomer in his philosophic novel Rasselas. Rasselas is on a journey to discover the secret of happiness and thinks he has found it in a learned scientist who has given over his life to studying the heavens. This man spends as much time charting interstellar space as political junkies spend surfing the internet, a comparison I make because similar results ensue. First, here’s Rasselas’s mentor Imlac reporting on the astronomer:  
I have just left the observatory of one of the most learned astronomers in the world, who has spent forty years in unwearied attention to the motion and appearances of the celestial bodies, and has drawn out his soul in endless calculations.
And now here’s the result, which Imlac discovers after noticing the astronomer’s depression and pressing him on it. The astronomer reveals that he does not possess the key to happiness after all:
Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit.  I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons.  The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds at my call have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command.  I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab.  The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.  I have administered this great office with exact justice, and made to the different nations of the earth an impartial dividend of rain and sunshine.  What must have been the misery of half the globe if I had limited the clouds to particular regions, or confined the sun to either side of the equator?
Just like many who follow the ups and downs of politics, the astronomer doesn’t differentiate between worrying about cataclysmic events and thinking he has control over them. And while he acknowledges he can’t prove his power, he trusts his vibes:
I…shall not attempt to gain credit by disputation.  It is sufficient that I feel this power that I have long possessed, and every day exerted it.
After describing the encounter, Imlac warns the Rasselas party,
He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is?  He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire…and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion.  
The problem is particularly acute, Imlac says, for those who have a strong sense of responsibility and who feel guilty for not doing more:
“No disease of the imagination,” answered Imlac, “is so difficult of cure as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt; fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other….[W]hen melancholy notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the faculties without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude or banish them.
Those who take their citizenship duties seriously may find conscience mixing with fantasies of power—we all have them—and consequently finding themselves plunged into melancholy or depression.
So what is to be done? Part of the problem is solitude, so Rasselas and his party pull the astronomer out of his observatory and get him to join them in a variety of activities, which include conversing with their lovely handmaiden Pekulah. In other words, they offer him perspective and a sense of proportion. Once they do, he comes to realize that he is doesn’t carry the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. As Imlac sums it up,
Open your heart to the influence of the light, which from time to time breaks in upon you; when scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not stand to parley, but fly to business or to Pekuah; and keep this thought always prevalent, that you are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue nor vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural favors or afflictions.
For concerned citizens, flying to business can include contacting members of Congress, writing postcards, knocking on doors, donating, and of course voting while flying to Pekuah may involve romantic outings, partying with friends, exercising, and so on. The key is stepping away from that black hole that is the political internet.
This remedy works with the astronomer, who reflects,
I now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to prey upon me in secret…I hope that time and variety will dissipate the gloom that has so long surrounded me, and the latter part of my days will be spent in peace.
To which Imlac replies, “Your learning and virtue may justly give you hopes.”
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