Alice Munro, R.I.P.

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2024
Alice Munro

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Wednesday

I’m reposting this essay, written ten years ago, on the occasion of the Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro, who died yesterday. Novelists generally get all the glory, certainly from the Nobel committee, with short story specialists regarded as poor cousins. But Munro, whom I compare to Chekhov, was an exception. Her stories are so sensitive, nuanced, and well-crafted that she built a fan base of discriminating readers.

Reprinted from August 22, 2014

My book discussion group met last night to discuss Alice Munro’s Dear Life, and for the first time I took a close look at our most recent Nobel laureate. Like the other members of the group, I saw my life in the author’s short stories.

Having recently spent time reading book after book to my grandson, I was immediately captivated by her description of reading to children:

The problem was that once she finished Christopher Robin, Katy wanted it started again, immediately. During the first reading she had been quiet, but now she began chiming in with ends of lines. Next time she chanted word for word though still not ready to try it by herself. Greta could imagine this being an annoyance to people once the dome car filled up. Children Katy’s age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.

As my reading group discussed the book, we came to see that this relationship with monotony isn’t confined to children. Or rather, there seem to be two contradictory tendencies at work in Munro’s fiction: monotony provides a reassuring security and monotony threatens to suffocate. Some characters thrash around in this dull monotony and even try to sabotage lives that appear prosperous and stable. Others have made their peace with monotony, ratcheting down what they demand of life.

One member of the group mentioned an essay by Margaret Atwood on national identities that we had discussed a while back. Atwood says that while America’s national story is about conquering the frontier, the Canadian national story involves simply surviving. We see the survival motif working itself out in the Canadian Munro. Sometimes people have lowered their expectations so as not to be hurt. In “Pride” a man with a hairlip is thrown off balance when a woman finds herself attracted to him and goes through some sad but comic twists to keep their cordial relationship from becoming intimate. In “Amundsen” a doctor suddenly and unexpected decides suddenly not to marry a woman as they are walking toward the courthouse. In “Train” a returning war veteran slips in and out of various people’s lives, his leaving seemingly timed to the rise of imminent intimacy.

Munro gives us insight into how she herself must have been taught to toe the line in “Night,” one of the autobiographical stories that conclude the collection. Note the contrast between the unimaginative father and the very imaginative child:

If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don’t think my father felt anything like this. I do know that if I had ever taxed him, with his use on me of the razor strap or his belt, he might have said something about like or lumping it. Those strappings, then, would have stayed in his mind, if they stayed at all, as no more than the necessary and adequate curbing of a mouthy child’s imagining that she could rule the roost.

“You thought you were too smart,” was what he might have given as his reason for the punishments, and indeed you heard that often in those times, with the smartness figuring as an obnoxious imp that had to have the same sass beaten out of him. Otherwise there was the risk of him growing up thinking he was smart. Or her, as the case might be.

The interesting twist in “Night” is that the child needs this father’s steadiness to recover from recurring insomnia accompanied by dark thoughts of murdering her sister. One night she meets her father sitting on the porch following one of her nocturnal ramblings and finds it immensely comforting that he expresses no alarm at her thoughts. By his simply taking them in stride’” – “Then he said not to worry. He said, ‘People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.’” – she is able to start sleeping again.

Munro reminds me a lot of Chekhov. Women in her stories act out without ever being sure of what they want. Men are offered relief from loneliness but turn it down because their routine lives seem safer. Children carry around holes in their hearts from tragedies that have happened—the death of a sibling or of a beloved babysitter—and never face up to their grief. Acknowledging deep feelings would render them vulnerable and they fear they wouldn’t be able to survive.

Munro neither condemns nor applauds these responses but sympathetically describes them. She is like the woman in “Dolly” who temporarily goes off the rails and writes her longtime partner an unforgivable letter. Returning to him before he gets the letter, she is simultaneously relieved and exasperated by his readiness to tear it up without reading it once it arrives:

What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel at his being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together.

The final paragraph in the book gets at this ambivalence from another angle:

I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.

Returning home for the funeral seems an extravagant gesture, putting one’s survival at risk. Should we nevertheless regret not doing it? Is it good that we then forgive ourselves since doing so is a way of keeping on? As always, these are open questions with Munro. She acknowledges human complexity so deeply that she refuses to settle upon a final judgment.

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Does Clockwork Orange Describe Us?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 13, 2024

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Tuesday

A few weeks ago Hullabaloo blogger Tom Sullivan wondered whether novelist Anthony Burgess has proved prescient with his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Are parts of America being conditioned by Russian authoritarianism?

Sullivan was responding to a Washington Post article about how “Red states Threaten Librarians with Prison,” something we couldn’t have imagined happening a few years ago. It took me a moment to understand Sullivan’s point. Then I recalled my own experience reading Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange in college.

It was as Sullivan describes: one is subtly conditioned as one reads the novel. Throughout, protagonist Alex uses a Russian-based teen slang called Nadsat, which Burgess has declined to translate. That doesn’t matter, however, as one senses what the words mean, even if one doesn’t know for sure. I still remember how, when reading the book in college, this rhetorical strategy got me to bond with the narrator Alex in unsettling ways. As Burgess observes,

The novel was to be an exercise in linguistic programming, with the exoticisms gradually clarified by context: I would resist to the limit any publisher’s demand that a glossary be provided. A glossary would disrupt the program and nullify the brainwashing.

To give you a taste of the experience, here’s Burgess’s opening:

“What’s is going to be then, eh?”

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else.  They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new vesches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one of two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.

And here’s what Alex and his gang members—excuse me, his droogs–do for fun.

Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts. But, as they say, money isn’t everything.

After various acts of violence, including a rape that ends in murder, Alex is captured and imprisoned. Thanks to an aversion therapy process known as “the Ludovico Technique,” he transitions from nihilistic thug to conditioned lab rat who gets sick whenever he witnesses or even thinks about violence. At the end of the novel—or at least, the end of the novel as it originally appeared—the government deprograms him back to his original thug self, only this time it does so in order to exploit his thuggery for its own purposes.

It so happens that Burgess wanted the novel to end differently and wrote a last chapter in which Alex becomes tired of his formerly violent ways and contemplates settling down and starting a family (although he predicts that his kids will be even more violent than he was). The original publisher pressured him to drop this chapter while, in his movie version, Stanley Kubrick ignored it. As a result, there’s no counter in the book or movie to what appears a celebration of “ultra-violence.”

It is because of the publisher’s decision that readers (including Kubrick) interpreted the novel as glamorizing  violence. After all, Alex’s flashy rhetoric and uninhibited behavior have more vibrancy than any of the governmental institutions or civilized norms responsible for maintaining social order.

The idea of the government using thuggery for its own purposes brings to mind Donald Trump encouraging the Proud Boys and other violent groups to attack the Capitol on January 6. Meanwhile, he continues to ramp up his incendiary threats in campaign rallies, insisting that only a rigged election will keep him from winning in 2024. (In a recent New Jersey rally he even lionized Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter.) For its part, the GOP has long endorsed unregulated access to firearms and celebrated such vigilante killers as George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Arizona rancher who shot a migrant.

The two extremes we witness in the book—someone conditioned to follow orders and someone running wild in the streets—are not as contradictory as it may seem, at least when it comes to fascist logic. I think of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives (1934), where he consolidated power by having the Gestapo extrajudicially execute his rowdier followers. (They killed 85 in the initial purge and perhaps as many as a thousand in the subsequent weeks.) I could well imagine a reelected Trump, were he to gain control over the military, using it to crack down on undisciplined groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and perhaps on Steve Bannon as well. Using Nazi Germany as a model, street stormtroopers are useful in the early stages of a fascist takeover but a liability when they alienate potential allies in the business and military communities.

In his article, Sullivan must acknowledge that, in one way, Clockwork Orange describes the opposite of what we are seeing. About the library bans, which for the most part target LGBTQ+ authors and authors of color, he writes,

The bans are a Republican reverse-Ludovico Technique aimed not at forcing children to read but Brezhnev Era censorship designed by right-thinking “patriots” hoping to prevent children’s exposure to ideas they deem wrong-thinking.

Still, conditioning young people, as Hitler did with the Nazi Youth, is a key agenda for the authoritarian right.

If we readers can be conditioned through Burgess’s use of Nadsat, we have a chance to see just how susceptible we are to manipulation. In fact, it’s a shock in the final chapter (the chapter dropped by the publisher) when we encounter one of Alex’s former droogs speaking standard English and his new wife giggling at Alex’s use of the old lingo. It’s like having been in a cult and then emerging to realize there’s another reality out there. If we don’t emerge from Burgess’s linguistic brainwashing —and neither the early edition of the novel or the film encourage us to—we remain with the impression that there’s something magnet about Alex. Fascists thrive off of such glamor.

GOP Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, recently warned that “Russian propaganda has taken hold among some of his House Republican colleagues and is even ‘being uttered on the House floor.’” His comments seconded what GOP Rep. Michael McCaul, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said a couple of days earlier about Russian propaganda taking root among the GOP. Such conditioning is captured in the popular MAGA tee-shirt, “I’d rather be Russian than a Democrat.”

A number of GOP members appear to be channeling Vladimir Putin, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. The violence that is always at the back of authoritarian thinking provides them with a special thrill.

The problem is not only on the right. We are seeing some leftwing protesters directly parroting Hamas slogans and calling for the destruction of Israel. They too get a high from the prospect of lashing out. Conditioning can affect ideologues of all stripes.

So what are we to think about a book that enacts the conditioning process? I worry that literature that speaks only to the gut and not to the head is potentially dangerous. In fact, it was this fear that led Burgess to disavow his novel. While doing a good job at depicting the attractions of juvenile delinquent culture, he doesn’t provide the reader with a powerful counter perspective from which to assess it. His last chapter was meant to provide that counter perspective but the publishers were right that it lacks the juice of the earlier chapters.

A better novel would have found a more compelling way to show the soul-draining emptiness of Alex’s destructive energies. Shakespeare is a master at providing such a three-dimensional perspective, and Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner do a pretty good job as well. That’s the difference between great literature and lesser literature.

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Trump, Stormy, and The Waste Land

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2024
Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump


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Monday

As I read Stormy Daniels’s account of her sexual encounter with Donald Trump—how she just stared at the ceiling as he did his business—I couldn’t help but think of T.S. Eliot’s description of the secretary and the “small house agent’s clerk” in The Waste Land. Both are equally empty and desolate. Here’s the story Eliot tells:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

Eliot has taken on the persona of Tiresias, the world-weary seer from Greek mythology who has seen it all. In this instance, he witnesses a loveless tryst, which is different from the Daniels-Trump episode mainly in that Daniels thought she had been invited to Trump’s penthouse apartment for dinner. As Daniels tells it, once she saw Trump undressed and blocking the door, she gave in and allowed him to have his way with her. After it was over, she left as quickly as she could.

In Eliot’s poem, by contrast, the affair occurs in the woman’s apartment. Also, she at least gets supper. It’s unclear how consensual the sex is because we don’t know if there has been pressure at the office (assuming she works for the man). Given that his caresses are “unreproved, if undesired,” it sounds like she too surrenders to the power dynamic. It’s certainly the case that the reactions of both women are the same: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

The “young man carbuncular” (pimply?) is a dead ringer for Trump in his narcissism. He doesn’t notice much about the woman because he’s so caught up in himself. “Flushed and decided, he assaults at once,” we are told and, “his vanity requires no response,/ And makes a welcome of indifference.” While Trump, unlike the clerk, actually is as rich as “a Bradford millionaire,” Eliot’s scathing put-down of the clerk’s sense of entitlement fits the former president to a tee.

The sordidness of the scene matches what we are learning from the New York trial. Recall that what set Trump’s hush money payments in motion was the need to save his campaign following the remarks caught on the Access Hollywood tape (“”I don’t even wait [to kiss a woman]. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”). Witnesses are informing us that many were convinced that, if Stormy Daniels’s account had gone public, the GOP would have replaced Trump on the ballot. Though we have become numbed to his outrageous behavior since the 2016 campaign, at the time his future hung in the balance. Therefore he paid for the story to be hushed up (along with his affair with Karen McDougall) and then falsified business records to hide the payments—which is to say, to hide his election interference.

In the poem, Eliot laments the decline of high heroic ideals, with Teiresias–who once witnessed the Oedipus tragedy and spoke to Odysseus in the underworld—now reduced to reporting on an illicit sex scene. In our own unheroic times, the Founders must be turning in their graves to see the kind of man their republic elected to the presidency once, with the possibility of doing it again.

It’s not only the young man carbuncular who is groping around in the dark trying to find an exit.

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He Took Us with Him to the Heart of Things

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2024
Stained glass in St. James the Greater Catholic Church (Concord NC)

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Ascension Sunday

In celebrating the moment when Jesus ascended into heaven, we come to the next stage of that momentous journey that began with Christmas and Epiphany. If Epiphany represents the moment when people came to realize that divinity can be found within the world—incarnate in a human being—then Ascension shows Christ modeling what it means to step fully into that divinity. As Malcolm Guite puts it in “A Sonnet for Ascension Day,” “We saw him go and yet we were not parted/ He took us with him to the heart of things.”

There may be an echo here of lines from Wordworth’s Tintern Abbey, where the poet talks about the moment when, “with an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, /We see into the life of things.” For contrast purposes, poets writing about the Ascension always dwell upon what it is they are stepping beyond. For John Donne, who is always wrestling with his recalcitrant heart (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”), Ascension washes or burns away our “drossy clay.”

Salute the last, and everlasting day,
Joy at the uprising of this Sun, and Son,
Ye whose true tears, or tribulation
Have purely wash’d, or burnt your drossy clay.

In this, the final lyric in Donne’s seven-sonnet sequence known as “The Crown,” Donne sees Christ paving the way to heaven. “Bright Torch, which shinest, that I the way may see!” he writes.

In his own Ascension poem Henry Vaughan too talks about earthly clay ascending “more quick than light.” He also uses a clothing analogy. “Who will ascend, must be undrest,” he asserts before noting how we have soiled the clothes we were given:

But since he
That brightness soiled,
His garments be
All dark and spoiled,
And here are left as nothing worth,
Till the Refiner’s fire breaks forth.

“He,” in this instance, is Adam, who in his naked innocence was “intimate with Heav’n”:

 Man of old
Within the line
Of Eden could
Like the Sun shine
All naked, innocent and bright,
And intimate with Heav’n, as light

With Christ’s arrival and then with the Ascension, the Fall doesn’t get the last word as “stained man” is made “more white than snow”:

Then comes he!
Whose mighty light
Made his clothes be
Like Heav’n, all bright;
The Fuller, whose pure blood did flow
To make stained man more white than snow.

For his part, Malcolm Guite talks about how “the heart that broke for all the broken-hearted” is now “whole and Heaven-centered.” This Jesus heart “sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,/ Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight.”

The result is that we, as witnesses, can “sing the waning darkness into light.” Jesus’s light is in us, just as our light is in him, with the barriers between heaven and earth coming down. As Guite explains,

The mystery of this feast is the paradox whereby in one sense Christ “leaves” us and is taken away into Heaven, but in another sense he is given to us and to the world in a new and more universal way. He is no longer located only in one physical space to the exclusion of all others. He is in the Heaven which is at the heart of all things now and is universally accessible to all who call upon Him.

And further:

His humanity is taken into heaven so our humanity belongs there too, and is in a sense already there with him.”  For you have died”, says St. Paul, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

Here’s Guite’s sonnet:

A Sonnet for Ascension Day

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centered now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed.

As I’ve been noting recently, John Gatta in Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology observes that “all creation” involves far more than humans. When we open ourselves to God’s bigness, we develop in ways that are beyond human imagining.

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A May Sarton Poem for Mother’s Day

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2024
Edvard Munch, Mother and Daughter

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Friday

With Mother’s Day coming up, here’s a May Sarton homage to her own mother. It’s fairly direct reminder that, when we look back, it’s important to dwell upon the good times.

For My Mother
By May Sarton

Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how we laughed
Till we cried
Swept into merriment
Especially when times were hard.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.

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Jane Eyre, Teacher of the Month

By Robin Bates | Published: May 8, 2024
Eichenberg, woodcut from Jane Eyre

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Thursday

This being Teacher Appreciation Week, I share the classroom experiences of one of literature’s great teacher characters. In Jane Eyre we see a true professional at work.

Commenting on the Lilliputian system of education, Jonathan Swift observes “that parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children.” Why certain parents think they can do a better job than skilled professionals says more about them than about our education system. These parents remind me of Blanche Ingram and her sisters who, right in front of Jane, show how badly they treated the governesses who taught them. We are fortunate that, even when suffering similar disrespect, our underpaid and overworked teachers demonstrate the same commitment to their students that Jane does.

I’ll admit that bad teachers exist, and in Bronte’s novel we get an instance of one in Lowood School’s Miss Scatcherd, who publicly humiliates the angelic Helen Burns and condemns her “to a dinner of bread and water on the morrow because she had blotted an exercise in copying it out.” Scatcherd, by failing to appreciate Helen’s beautiful mind, prompts Jane to reflect, “Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd’s can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.”

So yes, there are those who focus on defects rather than seeing the full student.

But there are more Jane Eyres and Miss Temples than Scatcherds in our school systems. Temple, the principle of Lowood, knows how to be teacher that both Jane and Helen need in their hours of extremity. Fair, kind, empathetic and just, Temple becomes a model for Jane. We go on to see Jane in three teaching situations: at Lowood when she grows up, at Thornfield Hall as governess to Adele, and in a country school as sole teacher.

While Jane has some nationalist prejudices when it comes to Adele (she regards her as a French coquette), she nevertheless takes her teaching duties seriously and the results are good. We know this from an interchange with Rochester regarding Adele’s progress. He has brought his ward a gift (“un cadeau”) and wonders if Jane expects one as well:

“I have examined Adèle, and find you have taken great pains with her: she is not bright, she has no talents; yet in a short time she has made much improvement.”

“Sir, you have now given me my ‘cadeau;’ I am obliged to you: it is the mead teachers most covet—praise of their pupils’ progress.”

When Jane is put in charge of a country schoolroom, she shines yet brighter, even though her task is a daunting one. She describes her situation:

This morning, the village school opened. I had twenty scholars. But three of the number can read: none write or cipher. Several knit, and a few sew a little. They speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other’s language. Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant…

She adds that others, however, “are docile, have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me.” And she reminds herself of a truth that every good teacher knows:

I must not forget that these coarsely clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born. My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I shall find some happiness in discharging that office.

Jane doesn’t pretend that this is her first choice of occupation. “Much enjoyment I do not expect in the life opening before me,” she admits. After all, she was on the verge of marrying the master of Thornfield Hall. But she resolves to soldier on, reassuring herself that “if I regulate my mind, and exert my powers as I ought, [this will] yield me enough to live on from day to day.”

The teaching episodes, often skipped over in film and television adaptations of Jane Eyre, are critical to her developing a full sense of self. After all, when she was first on the verge of becoming Mrs. Rochester, she all but gave away her power, allowing Rochester to shape her. As she puts it at one point,

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

She leaves because “I care for myself,” and this care involves escaping his influence. Her teaching stint helps her step into her powers, all the more so because challenges her to the max. Sounding like many first-year teachers, the task ahead of her at first seems hopeless:

I continued the labors of the village-school as actively and faithfully as I could. It was truly hard work at first. Some time elapsed before, with all my efforts, I could comprehend my scholars and their nature. Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me hopelessly dull; and, at first sight, all dull alike…

Once education begins to work its wonders, however, she discovers she has underestimated her students. There’s more in them than she first realized:

 There was a difference amongst them as amongst the educated; and when I got to know them, and they me, this difference rapidly developed itself. Their amazement at me, my language, my rules, and ways, once subsided, I found some of these heavy-looking, gaping rustics wake up into sharp-witted girls enough. Many showed themselves obliging, and amiable too; and I discovered amongst them not a few examples of natural politeness, and innate self-respect, as well as of excellent capacity, that won both my goodwill and my admiration.

The students respond to her appreciation:

These soon took a pleasure in doing their work well, in keeping their persons neat, in learning their tasks regularly, in acquiring quiet and orderly manners. The rapidity of their progress, in some instances, was even surprising; and an honest and happy pride I took in it: besides, I began personally to like some of the best girls; and they liked me. I had amongst my scholars several farmers’ daughters: young women grown, almost. These could already read, write, and sew; and to them I taught the elements of grammar, geography, history, and the finer kinds of needlework. I found estimable characters amongst them—characters desirous of information and disposed for improvement—with whom I passed many a pleasant evening hour in their own homes.

To be sure, Jane’s teaching career proves to be of short duration, and eventually she returns to Thornfield to nurse Rochester back to health and become his wife (“Reader, I married him”). Some find this ending dissatisfying.

For instance, in her study of the marriage plot, feminist Rachel Blau DuPlessis complains how, in the 19th century, women were not allowed their own growth novels: they either ended up married or dead. Even in Jane Eyre, she says, whatever growth occurs in the middle of the novel is held of no account by the end as the “hero” dwindles to a married heroine.

To her credit, Bronte changes this in her next novel (spoiler alert). In what looks, until the last pages, like a romance, Villette concludes with Paul Emanuel dying at sea and Lucy Snowe running her own school. Readers, including Bronte’s own father, complained vociferously, causing Bronte to alter the ending—but instead of giving them what they wanted, she shrouded the ending in ambiguity, telling them that it was up to them, not to her, to imagine a “Reader I married him.” Or as she puts it, ”Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.”

Who needs to be a wife when one can be a teacher?

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On Gulliver and Biden Putting Out Fires

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2024
Illus. from Gulliver’s Travels


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Wednesday

Ronald Reagan famously asked the question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and if the upcoming election were really to be determined by that answer, there would be no question about the winner. After all, four years ago thousands of people were dying and unemployment was soaring as Donald Trump mismanaged the pandemic in multiple ways. But instead of recalling those uncomfortable facts, many just recall that gas prices were low while Democratic governors were requiring that people wear masks and stay away from others.

The blaming continued the following year. Although, in 2021, the new Biden administration brought an end to the dying through the vigorous promotion of vaccines along with continued masking, Republicans have managed to convince many to focus on the measures taken to address the catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself.

There’s a comparable situation in Gulliver’s Travels, which my faculty book group is currently discussing (at my suggestion). The palace of Lilliput has caught on fire and, having left his leather jerkin elsewhere (so that he can’t use it to smother the flames), Swift must find an alternative solution. First, the situation:

I was alarmed at midnight with the cries of many hundred people at my door; by which, being suddenly awaked, I was in some kind of terror. I heard the word Burglum repeated incessantly: several of the emperor’s court, making their way through the crowd, entreated me to come immediately to the palace, where her imperial majesty’s apartment was on fire. The case seemed wholly desperate and deplorable; and this magnificent palace would have infallibly been burnt down to the ground, if, by a presence of mind unusual to me, I had not suddenly thought of an expedient.

Now for the expedient:

I had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort,) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world, I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by laboring to quench them, made the wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction.

Gulliver expects to be thanked for this service but quickly learns that no good deed goes unpunished. First, he is informed that it is a capital crime to urinate within the palace. While the emperor grants him a formal pardon, the empress is less forgiving. Feeling “the greatest abhorrence” for what Gulliver has done, she “removed to the most distant side of the court, firmly resolved that those buildings should never be repaired for her use: and, in the presence of her chief confidants could not forbear vowing revenge.”

Eventually, Gulliver learns from one of the court ministers, she tries to have him put to death, “having borne perpetual malice against you, on account of that infamous and illegal method you took to extinguish the fire in her apartment.”

Biden’s competent management of the pandemic, which contrasts so markedly with Trump’s, should have helped pave the way for an easy reelection. Unfortunately, the polls remain close as far too many Americans are proving to be small-minded and vindictive Lilliputians

Further thought: The lack of appreciation for Biden’s efforts puts me in mind of how Lilliput deals with ingratitude—or at least how it did so in its golden past before it became a degenerate nation. For the ancient Lilliputians, ingratitude was a capital crime:

[T]hey reason thus; that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he has received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live.

I’m obviously not advocating this for the GOP. Nor would Swift, for that matter, who has just found a dramatic way to emphasize the ugliness of ingratitude. He provides another instance of Lilliputian ingratitude later after Gulliver brings peace between Lilliput and its rival Blefescu (France) by stealing Blefescu’s fleet. Rather than thank him, the emperor declares him a traitor for not going futher, using his size to wipe Blefescu off the map. For his disobedience, Gulliver is to have his eyes shot out, which would result in him becoming an unresisting tool of the emperor’s imperial agenda.

And yet more thoughts: Since Gulliver’s Travels is a satiric allegory as well as an adventure story, both the palace and fleet incidents have real life antecedents. Apparently Queen Anne was so put off by Swift’s early satire Tale of a Tub (1704), a buoyant, profane and controversial exploration of religious excess, that she quashed all promotion hopes. Swiftian acerbic satire, one might say, is like pissing on a fire to put it out: critics only smell the stench while failing to acknowledge the necessity.

Something comparable happened in the early years while Swift was in the Tory administration. Through secret talks, the Tories paved the way for the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the bloody War of Spanish Succession. Those talks were illegal and therefore problematic, leading to Whig accusations of treason and selling out to the French, but much bloodshed was averted as a result. A comparable situation in our own time could be Biden messily pulling the United States out of Afghanistan, the longest standing war in our history–while arguably necessary, the action was roundly criticized.  

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On Comedy, Seinfeld, and Tom Jones

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2024
Finney and Cilento as Tom and Molly in Tom Jones (1963)

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Tuesday

A recent column by the Washington Post’s Brian Broome about comedian Jerry Seinfeld has me revisiting one of my all-time favorite works, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. I should add that this column has more to say about the 18th century novel and the nature of comedy than about Seinfeld’s complaints about woke audiences but I promise you that it’s all connected.

Apparently Seinfeld has been complaining that our “woke” culture doesn’t have a sense of humor because they aren’t laughing at him anymore. Broome begins his column by informing us that he was never laughing:

I have never found Jerry Seinfeld funny. Even in the ’90s when his show was all the rage, I didn’t get why people thought it was hilarious. It always seemed to me to be about immigrants being odd or unhygienic or making fun of women’s faces or body parts. The show always seemed mean-spirited to me, and that’s just not my kind of humor.

Rather than taking shots at Seinfeld, however, Broome’s major point is that comedy has to change with the times. He provides two examples, the second of which puts me in mind of Tom Jones:

Blackface, for example, was considered funny at one time, and I’m positive that, when it fell out of fashion, there was some old White guy complaining about how nothing is funny anymore and people have lost their sense of humor and it’s a shame he can’t say the n-word like he used to. “Punch and Judy,” a violent puppet show for children in which one of the puppets (Punch) would lay into his wife (Judy) and others with a stick, sometimes beating the daylights out of them. Punch was popular in its time. When it was called out for being problematic, I’m sure there were people who complained about that, too.

Now, I suspect that Seinfeld might make the same critique of Broome that Tom Jones makes of a puppet-master who decides to censor his own Punch and Judy Show. The entertainer does so in order to please the moral censors of his day, and at first he is applauded. Instead of Punch and Judy, he offers his public a morally correct comedy about a “provoked husband” chastising his philandering wife:

The puppet-show was performed with great regularity and decency. It was called the fine and serious part of the Provoked Husband; and it was indeed a very grave and solemn entertainment, without any low wit or humor, or jests; or, to do it no more than justice, without anything which could provoke a laugh. The audience were all highly pleased. A grave matron told the master she would bring her two daughters the next night, as he did not show any stuff; and an attorney’s clerk and an exciseman both declared, that the characters of Lord and Lady Townley were well preserved, and highly in nature.

The applause leads the  puppet-master to discourse on how the age has progressed:

The master was so highly elated with these encomiums, that he could not refrain from adding some more of his own. He said, “The present age was not improved in anything so much as in their puppet-shows; which, by throwing out Punch and his wife Joan, and such idle trumpery, were at last brought to be a rational entertainment. I remember,” said he, “when I first took to the business, there was a great deal of low stuff that did very well to make folks laugh; but was never calculated to improve the morals of young people, which certainly ought to be principally aimed at in every puppet-show…

Tom, sounding like Seinfeld, is unimpressed, “I would by no means degrade the ingenuity of your profession,” he replies, “but I should have been glad to have seen my old acquaintance master Punch, for all that; and so far from improving, I think, by leaving out him and his merry wife Joan, you have spoiled your puppet-show.”

Tom’s complaint elicits the puppet-master’s  contempt:

[W]ith much disdain in his countenance, he replied, “Very probably, sir, that may be your opinion; but I have the satisfaction to know the best judges differ from you, and it is impossible to please every taste. I confess, indeed, some of the quality at Bath, two or three years ago, wanted mightily to bring Punch again upon the stage. I believe I lost some money for not agreeing to it; but let others do as they will; a little matter shall never bribe me to degrade my own profession, nor will I ever willingly consent to the spoiling the decency and regularity of my stage, by introducing any such low stuff upon it.”

As is his wont, however, Fielding immediately upsets these high moral declarations by introducing some low comedy of his own:

A violent uproar now arose in the entry, where my landlady was well cuffing her maid both with her fist and tongue. She had indeed missed the wench from her employment, and, after a little search, had found her on the puppet-show stage in company with the Merry Andrew, and in a situation not very proper to be described.

The “wench” proceeds to blame the puppet-master’s seemingly moral production for her behavior:

Though Grace (for that was her name) had forfeited all title to modesty; yet had she not impudence enough to deny a fact in which she was actually surprized; she, therefore, took another turn, and attempted to mitigate the offence. “Why do you beat me in this manner, mistress?” cries the wench. “If you don’t like my doings, you may turn me away. If I am a w—e” (for the other had liberally bestowed that appellation on her), “my betters are so as well as I. What was the fine lady in the puppet-show just now? I suppose she did not lie all night out from her husband for nothing.”

This prompts the landlady, who had before been praising The Provoked Husband for its high sentiment, to turn her fire on it, calling the puppeteers “lousy vermin” who have turned her inn into a bawdy-house. Modern-day puppet shows, she says, “teach our servants idleness and nonsense,” and she longs for puppet-shows from the past:

I remember when puppet-shows were made of good scripture stories, as Jephthah’s Rash Vow, and such good things, and when wicked people were carried away by the devil. There was some sense in those matters; but as the parson told us last Sunday, nobody believes in the devil now-a-days; and here you bring about a parcel of puppets drest up like lords and ladies, only to turn the heads of poor country wenches; and when their heads are once turned topsy-turvy, no wonder everything else is so.

Fielding revels in recounting how the self-censoring puppet-master has been hoisted with his own petard, as the saying goes. The point to be made here is that there is no placating self-righteous guardians of morality, as anyone encountering purists will quickly discover, whether they come from the left or the right. Give them an inch and they’ll take it a mile. Therefore, it’s satisfying to see the man effectively silenced:

 Nothing indeed could have happened so very inopportune as this accident; the most wanton malice of fortune could not have contrived such another stratagem to confound the poor fellow, while he was so triumphantly descanting on the good morals inculcated by his exhibitions. His mouth was now as effectually stopt, as that of quack must be, if, in the midst of a declamation on the great virtues of his pills and powders, the corpse of one of his martyrs should be brought forth, and deposited before the stage, as a testimony of his skill.

It should be noted that, in arguing for Punch and Judy, Fielding has his own art in mind. His comic novel elevates an indecorous hero of unknown parentage and sends him boozing and womanizing through the countryside and on into London (although we love him for his good heart and strong sense of honor). In fact, barbs similar to those directed by the puppet-master against Punch were directed against Tom Jones by multiple critics. Among these were Samuel Johnson, who feared that the novel would corrupt young people. As the great moralist argued,

These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.

So should we use Fielding to defend Seinfield against so-called woke culture? Possibly. But much as I admire Fielding’s comedy—Tom Jones is the reason I focused on 18th century British literature in grad school—he is not exempt from Broome’s criticism. There are parts of Fielding’s comedy that haven’t aged well, starting with his incessant old maid jokes. Sometimes I find myself wincing in ways I didn’t in 1973, when I first read the novel.

I don’t think it’s because I’m a humorless moralist. It’s just that certain jokes now seem somewhat cheap, flaws in what is otherwise a brilliant comic diamond. Which brings me back to the conclusion of Broome’s article:

So, yes, if you make ham-fisted jokes about women, or the LGBTQ+ community or people living with disabilities or the French, someone will come for you. And I don’t think it’s because they “don’t have a sense of humor.” I think it might just be because you’ve been living in a bubble and they are tired of playing Judy to your Punch.

There’s plenty to laugh at in our world without hitting down. Seinfeld just sounds like a curmudgeon whose act has worn thin and who can’t keep up with the times.

Further thought: The same thing happened to Henry Fielding. In Tom Jones, he pulls off an amazing comic balance between the traditions of the landed gentry and a rapidly changing England that is characterized by a new acquisitive spirit and urban chaos. In the end, the old values prevail as Tom returns to the country to become gentry himself, uniting two country estates through his marriage to Sophia. But Fielding needs a certain ironic detachment to pull this off, which he achieves through a framing narrative where he comments on the novelistic devices required to pull off a happy ending. In other words, even as he gives us the romantic fantasy we desire, he does so with a sly wink, comparable to what occurs in the novel and movie The Princess Bride. In his later Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, by contrast, Fielding sounds increasingly petulant and out of control. The world is changing in ways that challenge his brand of comedy and he doesn’t like it.

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The Founders vs. Dostoyevsky’s Inquisitor

By Robin Bates | Published: May 5, 2024
Ferris, Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776


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Monday

A superb Washington Post article by Robert Kagan (gifted here) has put Donald Trump within the broader context of American history in a way I find very illuminating. When I sent it to my brothers, Jonathan said it put him in mind of Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, which in turn got me thinking about the Grand Inquisitor episode is Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov. Hang on while I explain.

According to Kagan’s article, which is adapted from his recent book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again (Penguin Random House), America’s Founders based the new republic “on a radical set of principles and assertions about government.” These principles and assertions were

that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.

Because they recognized how radical their ideas were, they also knew that “a new way of thinking and acting” was required. This new way set up inevitable conflicts from the very beginning since most people of the time thought and behaved differently. The Founders, Kagan says, were well aware of this, knowing

that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. 

Because the Declaration of Independence was so radical, a significant number of Americans kicked back against it and have been doing so ever since. Believing that America should be governed by White Protestants, they felt and have continued to feel “under siege” by the Founders’ liberalism, which Abraham Lincoln later endorsed and backed up by force.

In Lincoln’s vision, the Declaration of Independence was the nation’s “standard maxim,” with a goal of “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere”—and it is this vision that some rightwing political scientists today call “liberal totalitarianism.” They claim they are being deprived of their “freedom” to “live a life according to Christian teachings” and that the government favors various minority groups (especially Black people) at their expense. Kagan observes,

Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, … but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.

Kagan turns to various rightwing intellectuals to flesh out this counter vision, including Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen, and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule. He reports,

The smartest and most honest of [rightwing intellectuals] know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government.

What they have in mind, Katan says, is a Christian commonwealth—which is to say (here he quotes Vermeule),

 a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”

Since most Americans are not White Protestants—or even White Christians—these rightwing intellectuals believe that democracy must be overthrown. Kagan elaborates on their view:

The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”

In this view, Trump has been an essential albeit imperfect vehicle for counterrevolution. Kagan turns to Deneen to elaborate:

If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them.”

Kagan adds that this is “a most Leninist concept indeed.”

Now to The Brothers Karamazov although, interestingly enough, the Grand Inquisitor’s diatribe is directed against Christianity, not democracy. But there is a democratic strain within Christianity, and it is this to which he is objecting. In other words, parallels between the Grand Inquisitor and today’s Christian authoritarians hold up.

In Dostoevsky’s novel, the rational brother (Ivan) is debating with the spiritual brother (Alyosha) about the latter’s vision of God as loving and benevolent. Setting up a thought experiment where Jesus is arrested by the Inquisition when he returns to the world, Ivan argues that he makes inhuman demands on people. When Jesus rejects Satan’s temptations in the desert—bread, safety, and earthly power—and when he tells his followers that they must rely on faith rather than miracles—he is putting impossible and therefore cruel demands upon them. Only saints are capable of rising to the occasion, the Inquisitor contends:

Thou hast burdened man’s soul with anxieties hitherto unknown to him. Thirsting for human love freely given, seeking to enable man, seduced and charmed by Thee, to follow Thy path of his own free-will, instead of the old and wise law which held him in subjection, Thou hast given him the right henceforth to choose and freely decide what is good and bad for him, guided but by Thine image in his heart. But hast Thou never dreamt of the probability, nay, of the certainty, of that same man one day rejected finally, and controverting even Thine image and Thy truth, once he would find himself laden with such a terrible burden as freedom of choice? That a time would surely come when men would exclaim that Truth and Light cannot be in Thee, for no one could have left them in a greater perplexity and mental suffering than Thou has done, lading them with so many cares and insoluble problems.

In Escape from Freedom (1941), the book mentioned by my brother, Erich Fromm uses a similar idea to explain why certain Germans embraced fascism over democracy. Individual freedom, he argued, causes fear, anxiety, and alienation whereas authoritarianism provides them with a kind of relief. The Grand Inquisitor makes the same argument against Christ’s challenge, asserting, “Thou has suffered for mankind and its freedom, the present fate of men may be summed up in three words: Unrest, Confusion, Misery!”

By contrast, the Inquisitor contends, the authoritarian church offers happiness:

We will prove to them their own weakness and make them humble again, whilst with Thee they have learnt but pride, for Thou hast made more of them than they ever were worth. We will give them that quiet, humble happiness, which alone benefits such weak, foolish creatures as they are, and having once had proved to them their weakness, they will become timid and obedient, and gather around us as chickens around their hen. They will wonder at and feel a superstitious admiration for us, and feel proud to be led by men so powerful and wise that a handful of them can subject a flock a thousand millions strong. Gradually men will begin to fear us. They will nervously dread our slightest anger, their intellects will weaken, their eyes become as easily accessible to tears as those of children and women; but we will teach them an easy transition from grief and tears to laughter, childish joy and mirthful song.

The Grand Inquisitor goes on for a while longer but you get the point. Christ’s vision that every individual is beloved by God—it doesn’t matter whether you are high or low, slave or free, man or woman—was as radical in Roman times as the Declaration of Independence was in the 18th century. In fact, Christ’s radical ideas helped make the democratic revolutions possible. So it is not only Founder liberalism that America’s contemporary rightwing intellectuals are objecting to but people finding their own individual ways to God.

These intellectuals, in their arguments for a new elite, don’t mention the potential for abuse and corruption, which we witness in every authoritarian regime. They appear to see themselves exempt from the truism that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Similarly, the Grand Inquisitor speaks as though the authoritarian church actually cares about the common people rather than, first and foremost, about its own concerns. One need only do a quick glance at the history of humankind to realize that “benevolent dictator” is an oxymoron.

Americans are beginning to get glimpses of what a Christian Commonwealth would look like as librarians, teachers, and doctors are threatened with prison, women are forced to bring non-viable fetuses to term, asylum seekers are shot, and threats of violence against political opponents are regarded as an acceptable means of maintaining order. If we are to judge by the questions asked at Trump’s immunity hearing last week, some rightwing members of the Supreme Court see presidents as above the law (at least Republican presidents). In their questions, they didn’t laugh Trump’s lawyers out of court when they argued that a president should be free to assassinate opponents or stage a coup.

I imagine Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh reading the Grand Inquisitor’s words and applauding.

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