Unless you were a Tom Brady fan or geographical loyalties to Tampa Bay, you had to look elsewhere for thrills during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Who would have predicted that, for many of us, a poem would be the event’s main highlight?
Amanda Gorman’s Super Bowl poem isn’t at the level of the one she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, in part because it features far less imaginative word play and intricate symbolism. To be sure, she once again drops rhymes, half-rhymes, and internal rhymes into her free verse format, and she has some of her characteristic alliteration, as in,
Let us walk with these warriors, Charge on with these champions, And carry forth the call of our captains!
Titling her poem “Chorus of the Captains” in the context of a sport events was a nice touch. And, once again, her delivery was magnetic. As the poem’s purpose was to honor front-line workers, it did its job just fine.
But in many ways, Gorman’s presentation was bigger than the poem itself. As the Washington Post, quoting poet Toi Derricotte, noted, Gorman
has taken an art form that felt inaccessible to some and made it universal. “She seems to have awakened the spirit of poetry the way I think it was intended to be, to be a voice of the people.”
Columbia English professor Sharon Marcus, meanwhile, told that Post that “we’re overdue for a poetic mega idol”:
“There have been celebrity poets for a long time. It’s more unusual to not have a celebrity poet — to have long periods of time where there aren’t celebrity poets — than to have celebrity poets,” said Marcus, who is also the author of The Drama of Celebrity:
Take Walt Whitman. (“A very celebrated, well-known persona. People knew what he looked like.”) Take Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (“Nobody reads him now, I mean his big poem, ‘Hiawatha,’ is like a nightmare of stereotypes about native peoples,” Marcus said, but he was “known around the world.”)
“The poet has always been this figure of not just writing, but speech and rhetoric and oration,” Marcus added, and there have “always been links between poetry and politics.”
So, she wasn’t surprised to hear of Gorman’s Super Bowl performance.
“Poets used to be kind of like rock stars,” she said, and “who performs at the Super Bowl? Rock and pop stars.”
Here’s the poem:
Chorus of theCaptains
Today we honor our three captains For their actions and impact in A time of uncertainty and need. They’ve taken the lead, Exceeding all expectations and limitations, Uplifting their communities and neighbors As leaders, healers, and educators. James has felt the wounds of warfare, But this warrior still shares His home with at-risk kids. During Covid, he’s even lent a hand Live-streaming football for family and fans. Trimaine is an educator who work nonstop, Providing his community with hotspots, Laptops, and tech workshops So his students have all the tools They need to succeed in life and in school. Suzie is the ICU nurse manager at a Tampa Hospital. Her chronicles prove that even in tragedy, hope is possible. She lost her grandmothers to the pandemic, And fights to save other lives in the ICU battle zone, Defining the frontline heroes risking their lives for our own. Let us walk with these warriors, Charge on with these champions, And carry forth the call of our captains! We celebrate them by acting with courage and compassion, By doing what is right and just. For while we honor them today It is they who every day honor us.
In observance of Super Bowl Sunday (I write this not knowing who won), I am repurposing a Super Bowl post from nine years ago when American households faced a dilemma very similar to one found in the Tom Robbins novel Skinny Legs and All (1990). In addition to being very funny, Skinny Legs has a great reflection on importance Americans attach to football’s championship game.
The conflict in America in February, 2012 was between the Super Bowl and a season finale of Downton Abbey. Just as Eli Manning was driving the Giants down the field for the come-from-behind win over the undefeated New England Patriots—a drive that included David Tyree’s immortal helmet catch—Downton Abbey was just wrapping up its season. For some, the conflict was excruciating.
In Robbins’s novel, the conflict is just as excruciating, pitting as it does the Super Bowl against a belly dancer. I can’t begin to do justice to this whacky, bawdy, and immensely enjoyable work, but to set up the scene quickly, a remarkable middle eastern dancer is so moved by a painting by protagonist Ellen Cherry Charles that she agrees to do the fabled dance of the seven veils:
This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history’s tragic glitter, where Delilah practiced for her beautician’s license, the room in which Salome dropped the seventh veil while dancing the dance of ultimate cognition, skinny legs and all.
Each of the seven veils represents something that keeps humans from happiness, including politics, religion, money, and fear of sex.
The dance occurs in an Israeli-Palestinian restaurant, co-owned by a Jew and a Muslim, that is located across the street from the United Nations and that is periodically bombed by fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Reading Skinny Legs in 1990 was my first introduction to the unhealthy union between end-of-days Christians and Israeli nationalists.
The patrons of the restaurant are thrilled at the prospect of Salome’s dance as the dancer has developed an immense fan base. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: she will be dancing exactly at the time of the Super Bowl. She can’t do otherwise as the stars, not she herself, decide. In other words, a brutal and overly commercialized sport is contrasted with the prospect of world peace.
Here’s Robbins:
Conflicts flared almost instantaneously. On the one side, there were those for whom the legendary Dance of the Seven Veils had taken on the proportions of fabulous personal fantasy—romantic, erotic, opulent, mysterious, resonant with long-lost exotica, secrets of the Bible and secrets of the East: they would have crawled ten kilometers on a carpet of dog poop and razor blades to witness it, were it the genuine article; and with this devastating nymph who called herself Salome, there was no question of authenticity. On the other side were those for whom the Super Bowl was the most anticipated event of each and every year, the culmination of five months of thrills, endless statistics, ego boosts, and severe disappointments; a major holiday, if not the major holiday, a day when routine and care were suspended; when they nation, the world, came together as one; a festival that cut cross national, racial and religious boundaries; a ritual during which no time existed except the artificial time on the game clock, a symbolic battle in which only token blood was shed and for the duration of which the grip of death on the human psyche was relaxed and put aside: Issac and Ishmael’s still had the biggest, sharpest television screen in midtown Manhattan, and this group had every intention of watching the game on it.
A few people think they’ll be able to move between both, but they are wrong. It’s one or the other. At the end of the novel, a Christian fundamentalist—today he would be a Trump supporter—attacks the dancer but is shot by a policeman who has become a Salome enthusiast.
Those who see the dance have life-altering revelations while those who watch the Super Bowl just watch the Super Bowl. I won’t say that those who watched Downton Abbey nine years ago had their lives changed, but it’s impressive that, during the football game, there was only a 10 percent drop-off from regular PBS viewership.
It’s okay if you watched the Super Bowl yesterday. Just keep it in perspective.
Van Gogh, Still Life with Earthenware, Bottles, and Clogs
Spiritual Sunday
I’ve been reading a Jane Hirshfield article in Poetry Foundation where she selects and comments on 22 examples of “spiritual poetry.” The subject was challenging, she says, because she finds all poems to be spiritual:
The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension— including all poems, even the most unlikely. Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams: all poets of spiritual life. A useful exercise of soul would be to open any doorstop-sized anthology at random a dozen times and find in each of the resulting pages its spiritual dimension. If the poems are worth the cost of their ink, it can be done.
It so happens that my friend Sue Schmidt recently sent me a Hirshfield poem that makes her point. If we pay attention, we will find light in even small everyday objects. It is up to us to meet that light “completely”:
Each time, the found world surprises— that is its nature.
If we pay attention, we will find ourselves saying what lovers from time immemorial have said: “What fools we were, not to have seen.”
Meeting the Light Completely
Even the long-beloved was once an unrecognized stranger.
Just so, the chipped lip of a blue-glazed cup, blown field of a yellow curtain, might also, flooding and falling, ruin your heart.
A table painted with roses. An empty clothesline.
Each time, the found world surprises— that is its nature.
And then what is said by all lovers: “What fools we were, not to have seen.”
who says she still bears scars from mean girl encounters from her prep school days, has compiled a list of some of her favorite literary mean girls. I recognize two of them and have added several of my favorites.
I’ve found it useful, in thinking of examples, to distinguish those mean girls who occupy privileged positions atop the social pyramid from those who are trying to scale its heights. Sense and Sensibility’s Lucy Steele can be excused, or at least understood, in a way that the execrable Fanny Dashwood cannot.
I’m sure I’ve left out some obvious candidates so please feel free to send in your favorites.
Starting first with Eaton’s list, she is spot on with Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice and Rebecca from Daphne de Maurier’s novel of that name. About Bingley she writes,
Snobbish, meddling, and two-faced, Caroline Bingley is the original mean girl. In Austen’s beloved novel of manners, when Caroline—an elegant, well-educated woman with a fortune of twenty thousand pounds—finds herself in danger of being sidelined by Elizabeth Bennett, she does what any villainess would do, freeze her out. Patronizingly cordial to Elizabeth in person, as soon as the eldest Bennett’s back is turned Caroline sticks the knife in. “She had no conversation, no style, no taste, no beauty,” she snaps, the 19th Century equivalent of trash-talking. Though Caroline’s snubbing of the Bennett sisters ultimately fails to keep Elizabeth and Darcy apart you have to admire her back-stabbing ambition.
I note that maybe the cattiest line in an Austen novel refers to Caroline. At the end of Pride and Prejudice, after Elizabeth has achieved the ultimate revenge for all of Bingley’s slights, Austen makes an observation that refers back to when Caroline was lobbying her brother to find a home close to Pemberley:
The darling wish of his sisters was then gratified; he bought an estate in a neighbouring county to Derbyshire, and Jane and Elizabeth, in addition to every other source of happiness, were within thirty miles of each other.
Not only does Caroline fail to land Darcy, but she’ll have to watch her rival enjoy the spoils of her victory.
Even worse that Caroline Bingley, however, has got to be Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
–Rebecca from Rebecca
Eaton says the following about Rebecca:
In du Maurier’s gothic classic a young bride marries a widower and is transported to a Cornish mansion where she attempts to fill the shoes of her glamorous predecessor. Even from the grave the eponymous Rebecca manages to outshine du Maurier’s meek narrator (only ever referred to as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter). Hedonistic, irreverent, licentious, Rebecca’s ghostly presence snakes menacingly around the novel, slowly tightening her grip.
–Fanny Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility
I find Fanny Dashwood far worse than Caroline Bingley because she does more active harm (although Caroline uses subterfuge to separate Jane from her brother). Fanny pays for her villainy, however (even though she doesn’t know it) by having to tolerate constantly the whims of her mother (Mrs. Ferrars) while engaging in incessant battles with her sister-in-law Lucy Steele. All this while Elinor and Marianne live blissful lives with two good men.
Oh yes, and Mrs. Ferrars competes with Lady Catherine de Bourgh as the worst of the elderly mean girls.
–Mrs. Elton from Emma
Mrs. Elton is a social-climbing mean girl although not one that does much harm. She gets under Emma’s skin in part because she is her double. This reveals that Emma herself has mean girl potential, although in the end she rises above it. Far meaner in Emma is a woman we never meet: Mrs. Churchill, who thankfully dies, thereby removing herself as an obstacle to Frank and Jane’s marriage.
–Isabel Thorpe from Northanger Abbey
Isabel is a self-absorbed social climber but, other than jilting Catherine’s brother (thank goodness), doesn’t do active harm. She’s useful to Catherine until Catherine finds more a more substantive female companion in Elinor Tilney.
–Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair
Becky is such a naked social climber that it’s hard to condemn her too much. Also, at the end she does the heroine—who’s a bit of a drip—a good turn.
–Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre
Anyone who complains about governesses in the presence of a governess fits this category. Blanche is an empty fraud and Rochester recognizes her as such.
–Cordelia from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye
Cordelia is the quintessential bully. She is so mean that, upon the novel’s publication, some feminists that had lionized Handmaid’s Tale weren’t sure that the author was still one of them. More interested in truth than in ideology, Atwood cautioned us that women have dark sides no less than men. Cordelia’s threat level diminishes as the narrator grows up and sees her as the insecure lower-class female that she is.
–Zenia from Atwood’s Robber Bride
It’s hard to think of a better mean girl since Zenia, after befriending each of three protagonists, steals their male friends, appearing to do so simply because she can. In Zenia’s defense, however, she does each of the three women a favor. Each of them is a bit of a doormat and Zenia prompts them to develop a spine and assert themselves. Zenia also brings them together so that, in opposition to her, they develop female solidarity. In the end, each needs to tap into her inner Zenia, and when Zenia mysteriously disappears at novel’s end, it’s as though she has served her purpose and is no longer needed.
In writing about literary mean girls, it’s apparent that they generally serve as important foils to the heroine . Sometimes they are there just to highlight the heroine’s virtues, but in the best cases they point to areas where the heroine needs work.
Today I share Otto Rene Castillo’s “Distances” in honor of the unbelievably brave Alexi Navalny, Russian leader of the opposition to Vladimir Putin, and to the equally brave demonstrators who are supporting him. The Guatemalan poet and activist would himself die in 1966, fighting against the brutal Guatemala regime, perhaps the worst in the world at that time. Castillo was first tortured and then burned alive.
I suspect that Castillo wrote the poem when he was in East Germany trying to figure out how to overthrow the government (thus “the bitter December air”). Friendship sometimes seems our only consolation when “the dictatorship is strong” and we are “desperate and pained.”
Distances by Otto Rene Castillo
Under the bitter December air a friend says “I’m disillusioned. Everything goes so slowly. The dictatorship is strong. I’m desperate and pained by the calvary of my people.”
And I, sensing his anguish, the gray and noble sadness of my friend, knowing his fight to keep on fighting, do not say: coward or go to the mountains or lazy or pessimist, rigid, poor devil.
I only put my arm around his shoulder, so the tearing cruelty of his cold be less.
As much of the country is pounded by snowstorms, I turn, as I often do at such moments, to the images of wintry misery found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sir Gawain is venturing out to keep his rendezvous with the Green Knight, who is to be found somewhere in the Welsh wilderness. The elements add the finishing touches to Gawain’s misery:
And if the wars were unwelcome, the winter was worse, When the cold clear rains rushed from the clouds And froze before they could fall to the frosty earth. Near slain by the sleet he sleeps in his irons More nights than enough, among naked rocks, Where clattering from the crest the cold stream ran And hung in hard icicles high overhead.
Medieval literature doesn’t go directly into psychological states, but it gives us images that let us know how Gawain is feeling:
With many birds unblithe upon bare twigs That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold. The good knight on Gringolet glides thereunder.
Gawain could be one of those birds, cold and filled with self-pity. At the end of his rope, he prays to the Virgin Mary for help.
I read the images of the cold and lost Gawain cold as symbolic of an existential crisis. He knows he is only days away from his death at the hands of the Green Knight, and the poet has used this wintry mix to get at his feelings of desolation.
As if in response to his prayers, a magnificent castle appears to Gawain. In this castle he will meet (as I interpret them) the Lord of Death and the Lady of Life. In response to his despair they will (1) affirm that death is in fact inevitable but (2) remind him that life offers up many delights. How should Gawain handle his depression about dying? Live fully in life’s sensuous present.
One could argue that Gawain has a “mind of winter,” to quote Wallace Stevens, and that Nature is trying to shake him up. If the knight steps out of his self-denying mindset and acknowledges that he does in fact love his life (by accepting the lady of the castle’s green sash), Green Knight Nature will give him a bit more time to enjoy it.
In short, look through the sleet and snow to the green life that beckons beyond. “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Percy Shelley asks.
The other day I read an eye-popping Politico article (well, eye-popping for nerds like me) comparing Donald Trump to Antipope Benedict XIII, the last of the Avignon popes. Benedict lost his French support in 1398, escaped capture in 1403, and then held on and even regained some legitimacy before dying in 1423 (!). As I read the piece, I thought of how Dante handles Boniface VIII, the pope largely responsible for the Rome-Avignon schism a hundred years earlier.
If Antipope Benedict is like the Trump who has just left office, Dante’s Boniface is like the Trump who opened up a schism in the GOP, prompting many formerly loyal Republicans to dream of their own version of an alternative Avignon papacy.
Michael Kruse’s article opens as though it were about Trump, even though Benedict is the actual subject:
The ousted leader refused to relent to reality.
Set against a backdrop of avarice and inequality and persistent sickness, distrust and misrule, the leader exploited and exacerbated societal unrest to seize and flaunt vast power—doing anything and everything he could to try to keep it in his grip. He resisted pleas for unity and calm. He tested the loyalty of even his most ardent and important establishment supporters. He was censured and then toppled. Still, though, he declined to consider even the smallest acquiescence. Besieged and increasingly isolated, he faded as he aged—but he never yielded. Some people believed he had no less than the blessing of God.
The Trump parallels suggest foreboding possibilities for our own future:
He tried to exert control from a fortress of a palace in a separate seat of power—propped up by a stubborn type of papal court, retaining sufficient political capital to pressure heads of states to pick sides, bestowing benedictions and other benefits and if nothing else gumming up earnest efforts to allay divides. Weary, irritated leaders, both religious and royal, “said, ‘You’re out, you’re out, you’re out,’” [Medieval scholar Joëlle] Rollo-Koster told me, “and he said, ‘No, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.’”
And then there’s this:
Manipulative and unabashed, he worked to cling to the trappings of power, sapped the sway of his counterpart popes and complicated attempts to mend the crippling split in the Roman Catholic Church called the Western Schism. Monarchs, clerics and other popes, his most potent adversaries, tried diplomacy, force and outright excommunication, ultimately stamping him a heretic—but they could never make the uncompromising Benedict altogether disappear. And there was an unexpected twist to Benedict’s intransigence, one Trump’s many high-ranking opponents would do well to heed: The harder and longer he held out, the more he was seen by some as a victim or a martyr, abidingly admired precisely because of his obstinacy and unwavering audacity.
Dante lambastes corrupt churchmen throughout the Divine Comedy, but Boniface VIII is his favorite target. Although Boniface was not yet dead in 1300 when the poem is set, he is mentioned by a number of souls in Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. For instance, the corrupt Pope Nicholas III, suffering hellish torments for using the papacy to build a fortune, initially thinks that Dante is Boniface and is confused. After all, he knows that Boniface won’t die until 1303, when he will be captured and beaten up by French forces:
“Are you there already, Boniface? Are you there already?” he cried. “By several years the writ has lied. And all that gold, and all that care –
are you already sated with the treasure for which you dared to turn on the Sweet Lady and trick and pluck and bleed her at your pleasure?
Nicholas has been inverted and stuck into a hole dug into rock, with only his legs protruding. His feet are on fire.
From every mouth a sinner’s legs stuck out as far as the calf. The soles were all ablaze and the joints of the legs quivered and writhed about.
Withes and tethers would have snapped in their throes. As oiled things blaze upon the surface only, so did they burn from the heels to the points of their toes.
“Master,” I said, “who is that one in the fire who writhes and quivers more than all the others? From him the ruddy flames seem to leap higher.”
To talk to the former pope, Dante must descend a level, where a hole in the side of the rock face allows conversation. He learns that, when Boniface dies, Nicholas will be pushed further into the hole as Boniface takes his place.
The punishment, as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Lord High Executioner puts it, fits the crime. As the latest in the apostolic succession that began with St. Peter (“the rock”), Nicholas and Boniface should be standing upright, their heads enveloped in a haloed glow. Instead, they have turned everything upside down. Dante compares the hole to a baptismal font, and the flaming feet are an inversion of the Pentecostal flames that marked the arrival of the Holy Spirit. In other words, when churchmen put money before God, they receive a grotesque parody of divine grace.
Dante is so infuriated by such corruption that he excoriates Nicholas (and by extension Boniface) in the way many of us would like to excoriate Trump for violating his oath of office and sacrificing America to his greed and ego:
Maybe — I cannot say — I grew too brash at this point, for when he had finished speaking I said: “Indeed! Now tell me how much cash
our Lord required of Peter in guarantee before he put the keys into his keeping? Surely he asked nothing but ‘Follow me!’
Nor did Peter, nor the others, ask silver or gold of Matthias when they chose him for the place the despicable and damned apostle sold.
Therefore stay as you are; this hole well fits you — and keep a good guard on the ill-won wealth…
And were it not that I am still constrained by the reverence I owe to the Great Keys you held in life, I should not have refrained
from using other words and sharper still; for this avarice of yours grieves all the world, tramples the virtuous, and exalts the evil.”
Dante goes on to compare Nicholas to the Whore of Babylon (in the Book of Revelation) before concluding,
Gold and silver are the gods you adore! In what are you different from the idolator, save that he worships one, and you a score?
There’s no question about what Trump adores. Unfortunately, like Antipope Benedict, he still commands enough allegiance from Trump idolaters to cause problems for the country he once swore to honor and protect.
Addendum: Sewanee English professor Ross MacDonald, a member of our Dante Discussion Group, pointed out that Nicholas’s inversion is also a grotesque parody of St. Peters’s crucifixion. So as not to imitate Jesus, Peter asked to be crucified upside down. Again, the contrast between Peter and his successors could not be more stark.
Philip Dawe, Tarring and feathering of British customs officer (1774)
Monday
Following the January 6 insurrection designed to pressure GOP Congress members to overturn the election (and perhaps to capture and even kill Democratic members), historians have been looking back through history at instances of mob vilence. These include everything from the Boston Tea Party to southern lynch mobs aiming to overturn the effects of the Equal Rights Amendment. James Madison, author of the Federalist Papers, worried that such “factionalism” would overwhelm rational decision making, and many of our constitutional safeguards were designed to counter the threat.
When I think of literary depictions of mob action, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” comes to mind. Set in pre-revolutionary America, the story features a young man (Robin) who, seeking expanded opportunities, goes to the city to profit from the patronage of Major Molineux, a British-appointed colonial governor. Instead he encounters a mob in action.
Hawthorne sets the stage in the opening paragraph:
After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the ready and general approbation which had been paid to those of their predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power, which did not emanate from themselves, and they usually rewarded the rulers with slender gratitude for the compliances, by which, in softening their instructions from beyond the sea, they had incurred the reprehension of those who gave them. The annals of Massachusetts Bay will inform us, that of six governors, in the space of about forty years from the surrender of the old charter, under James II, two were imprisoned by a popular insurrection; a third, as Hutchinson inclines to believe, was driven from the province by the whizzing of a musketball; a fourth, in the opinion of the same historian, was hastened to his grave by continual bickerings with the House of Representatives; and the remaining two, as well as their successors, till the Revolution, were favored with few and brief intervals of peaceful sway. The inferior members of the court party, in times of high political excitement, led scarcely a more desirable life.
It so happens that Robin arrives in the city at the moment when his kinsman will be similarly overthrown. No one informs him of what is about to happen, however, so he wanders through a welter of confusion until encountering the story’s climactic scene:
A mighty stream of people now emptied into the street, and came rolling slowly towards the church. A single horseman wheeled the corner in the midst of them…In his train were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets. A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the procession in, and several women ran along the sidewalk, piercing the confusion of heavier sounds, with their shrill voices of mirth or terror.
The horseman leading the procession is a “double-faced” figure that Robin has previously encountered. One can interpret the red as revolution and the black as nihilism:
One side of the face blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight, the division line being in the broad bridge of the nose; and a mouth which seemed to extend from ear to ear was black or red, in contrast to the color of the cheek. The effect was as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage.
In the final scene, revolution and nihilism have combined in this attack on the government:
The leader turned himself in the saddle, and fixed his glance full upon the country youth, as the steed went slowly by. When Robin had freed his eyes from those fiery ones, the musicians were passing before him, and the torches were close at hand; but the unsteady brightness of the latter formed a veil which he could not penetrate. The rattling of wheels over the stones sometimes found its way to his ear, and confused traces of a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted into the vivid light. A moment more, and the leader thundered a command to halt: the trumpets vomited a horrid breath, and held their peace; the shouts and laughter of the people died away, and there remained only a universal hum, allied to silence. Right before Robin’s eyes was an uncovered cart. There the torches blazed the brightest, there the moon shone out like day, and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sat his kinsman Major Molineux!
He was an elderly man, of large and majestic person, and strong, square features, betokening a steady soul; but steady as it was, his enemies had found means to shake it. His face was pale as death, and far more ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the foam hung white upon his quivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by a quick and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation.
It was only through luck and the heroic actions of a few individuals that America didn’t see some of its own leaders suffer comparable fates. As it was, five people died and 140 officers suffered injuries, including one who lost an eye.
A particularly disturbing element of the story is that Robin, like many who attended the Trump rally preceding the Capitol attack, gets caught up in the excitement–it seems a frolic–and all but joins the mob:
The contagion was spreading among the multitude, when, all at once, it seized upon Robin, and he sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the street; every man shook his sides, every man emptied his lungs, but Robin’s shout was the loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from their silvery islands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the sky! The Man in the Moon heard the far bellow; “Oho,” quoth he, “the old earth is frolicsome tonight!”
In our case, Madisonian checks preserved our republic, although only barely. Reason did in fact prevail as Congress voted to uphold the election results and Joe Biden became president. On the dark side, far too many Republicans voted the way the mob wanted them to, despite the non-existence of voter fraud. One shudders to think what would have occurred had the entire election come down to a single state and had Republicans had a majority in the House.
Hawthorne’s story is interesting because he doesn’t romanticize the energies that led to the American Revolution. He doesn’t go into the details of what galvanized the mob (he deliberately avoids “a long and dry detail of colonial affairs”). Rather, he leaves us with the same question that confront us: what does one do after witnessing a mob at work?
Robin’s first instance is to run back home where everything is familiar. “I begin to grow weary of a town life, Sir,” he says, addressing a gentleman who has served as a guide. “Will you show me the way to the ferry?”
The man, however, refuses to do so, telling him, “Some few days hence, if you continue to wish it, I will speed you on your journey. Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux.”
It is up to Robin, just as it is up to us, to figure out how to negotiate the uncharted waters that lie before us. Thanks to Trump and the new GOP, we can no longer take for granted customary democratic safeguards, just as Robin cannot rely on Major Molineux. We must rise in the world looking to our own resources.
Maybe that’s an overly grim assessment since, for the most part, the courts have remained committed to the rule of law, various Republicans have told the truth about the elections (but paid a price in doing so), and the armed forces have remained loyal to the Constitution. The mob isn’t calling all of the shots.
But, as with Robin, the way forward is a lot murkier than we once thought.
If you feel at all discouraged by skyrocketing Covid cases or rising rightwing terrorism or (fill in the blank), here’s a wonderful poem about St. Jude, patron saint of impossible causes. Joseph Awad, a Lebanese-American, knows as an impossible cause when he sees one. “Once beautiful Beirut,” he laments, has been “bloodied by Christian, Jew and Druze” and “weeps like a wound just under the world’s heart.”
St. Jude, one of the twelve disciples, may have been martyred in Lebanon. Awad doesn’t know what impossible acts he performed, but he is “beginning a novena [series of prayers]” to him.
When something seems impossible, don’t stop praying.
For Jude’s Lebanon
It is said he was a relative of Jesus, That his apostolate Was to the land we know as Lebanon, That he gave his blood for Christ. What wonders did he perform To win the Barnum & Bailey blurb, “Patron saint of the impossible.”
I’m beginning a novena to St. Jude.
His lone epistle opens lovingly: “Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ And brother of James, to the called Who have been loved in God the Father And preserved for Christ Jesus, Mercy and peace and love Be yours in abundance.”
I’m beginning a novena to St. Jude.
He had a poet’s way with words. Evil, sensual men he called “Wild waves of the sea, Foaming up their shame, Wandering stars for whom The storm of darkness Has been reserved forever.”
I’m beginning a novena to St. Jude.
In Lebanon there is loud lamentation. Beirut, once beautiful Beirut, Bloodied by Christian, Jew and Druze, Weeps like a wound just under the world’s heart. Pontius Pilates in world capitals Wash their hands, pronouncing solemnly, The situation is impossible.”
