My mother, who runs a poetry column for Sewanee’s weekly newspaper, is sharing A.A. Milne’s “Buckingham Palace” for Inauguration Day and I’m following suit. I’m praying that the inauguration proceeds seamlessly as I post this 36 hours before the actual event.
The poem’s humor lies in the contrast between what sounds like a momentous occasion and the incidental concerns of a child. The actual changing of the guard is somewhat boring, which is why we find Alice catering to a four-year-old’s stream of consciousness.
May our own inauguration be similarly incident free.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. Alice is marrying one of the guard. “A soldier’s life is terrible hard,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. We saw a guard in a sentry-box. “One of the sergeants looks after their socks,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. We looked for the King, but he never came. “Well, God take care of him, all the same,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. They’ve great big parties inside the grounds. “I wouldn’t be King for a hundred pounds,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. A face looked out, but it wasn’t the King’s. “He’s much too busy a-signing things,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. “Do you think the King knows all about me?” “Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea,” Says Alice.
The other day Joyce Carol Oates, observing the insurrection at the Capitol, commented on how the violent craziness of Trumpists feeds on itself. Oates is an author who knows crazy, having explored the darkest recesses of the human soul in such novels as The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Daddy Love. (To this day I wish I could get Daddy Love’s serial killer out of my head.) To illustrate her point, however, I turn a different novel, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
In two tweets, Joyce observed the following about the Capitol Hill marauders:
Initially they were (just) racists with a (latent) wish to kill Blacks. then, they began to wish to kill whites whose political convictions differed from their own. then, their wish to kill began to include other right-wingers like themselves who were not–quite–as crazy…
The rioting criminal mob came within 60~ seconds of seeing Mike Pence on Jan. 6. And they were just 90 feet away from a small office where Pence was hiding, before a cop steered them away.
The mob began chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” after Donald Trump tweeted that the vice president wasn’t doing enough to stop Congress from certifying the election results. Given that they didn’t hold back from beating Capitol police, it’s not hard to imagine them injuring or even killing Pence and Nancy Pelosi had they caught them.
In Song of Solomon Guitar, the protagonist Milkman’s best friend, becomes unhinged by white-on-black violence and joins a secret organization called “the Seven Days.” The organization has seven members, each of whom pledges to kill an innocent White each time Whites kill an innocent Black. Many Americans have seen friends and family descend into similar cult madness over the past four years.
As Oates predicts, the violence doesn’t stop with Whites. A coolness springs up between Milkman and Guitar once Milkman learns about the group, and it doesn’t take long before Guitar thinks Milkman has betrayed them in a search they are conducting for Confederate gold. It doesn’t matter that Guitar’s evidence is as thin as massive voter fraud in the 2020 election, consisting only of an unexplained crate. Logic won’t convince someone in the grip of a conspiracy theory, however:
“Guitar, I didn’t ship no gold. There wasn’t any gold to ship. You couldn’t have seen me.”
“I saw you, baby. I was in the station.
“What fuckin station?”
“The freight station in Danville.”
Milkman remembered then, going to look for Reverend Cooper, looking all over for him. Then going into the station house to see if he’d gone, and there helping a man lift a huge crate onto the weighing platform. He started to laugh. “Oh, shit. Guitar, that wasn’t no gold. I was just helping that man lift a crate. He asked me to help him. Help him lift a big old crate. I did and then I split.”
Facts have become irrelevant to Guitar, however, and he goes over Milkman twice, first with piano wire and then with a gun.
Milkman, meanwhile, has been undergoing his own narrative arc, one that is far more hopeful. Just as many are harkening back to America’s roots in the Declaration of Independence, so Milkman connects with his roots in slaves who resisted white oppression. At the novel’s end, we don’t know whether conspiracy violence or newfound hope will prevail, just as we don’t know whether Trumpist hate or Biden healing with our own future.
Despite the open ending, however, Morrison’s closing paragraph–one of the greatest in American literature–leaves us hopeful. Although Guitar, standing on one mountain ledge, is prepared to pick off Milkman, standing on another, Morrison assures us that if we give ourselves up to the heroic vision of our ancestors, we will be buoyed up:
“You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now. “You need it? Here.” Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Ieshia Evans detained by police in Baton Rouge BLM protest
Monday – Martin Luther King Day
Martin Luther King Day couldn’t be better timed this year, coming as it does between an aborted white supremacist insurrection and the swearing in of the first woman African American vice president. A fair number of white Americans—enough to make a difference in the presidential election—are awakening to the reality of systemic racism, which African Americans have been trying to tell them about all their lives. Such people, I suspect, will now be much more open to June Jordan’s poem “Jim Crow: The Sequel,” written in 2000.
Before turning to it, a note on why it has taken such whites so long to wake up. For me, the principal virtue of Lee Harper’s own sequel, Go Set a Watchman, is that it shows how white privilege works corrupts otherwise decent people. As long as he is comfortably situated atop America’s racial hierarchy, Atticus Finch can be the principled defender of justice. Once African Americans demand advancement, however, the man who once expressed contempt for the Ku Klux Klan joins the White Citizens Council, the Chamber of Commerce version of the KKK. This explains why Calpurnia, who raised his kids, is no longer speaking to him.
Because he has a fundamental sense of fairness, however, there’s a chance Atticus can still be swayed. Just as he’s willing to listen to a disillusioned Scout, now an adult, I like to think he might give ear to Jordan’s poem.
The Black Lives Matter protests received an unprecedented amount of white support last summer. So did Joe Biden in the past election. And while it may not mean a lot, two days ago Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford apologized to his black constituents for questioning the results of the presidential election, which could cause him a lot of grief from Trump supporters. We may be seeing significant cracks in the white wall.
I don’t expect the cracks to open up into a flood, and we’ve all been deluded by hope before. Jordan quotes Lyndon Johnson’s call for “equality as a fact and as a result,” and the occasion of her poem is George W. Bush’s dog whistle racism thirty years later. Bush, like his father, employed the Lee Atwater playbook, using coded language (“states’ rights,” for instance) rather than the n-word. When Trump turned the dog whistle into a bullhorn, however, certain whites found themselves choosing decency over entitlement. They may, for the first time in their lives, be willing to listen to “an angry Black woman on the subject of the angry White man.”
Dare to dream.
Jim Crow: The Sequel By June Jordan
An angry Black woman on the subject of the angry White man:
We didn’t always need affirmative action When we broke this crazy land into farms when we planted and harvested the crops when we dug into the earth for water when we carried that water into the big house kitchens and bedrooms when we built that big house when we fed and clothed other people’s children with food we cooked and served to other people’s children, wearing the garments that we fitted and we sewed together, when we hacked and hauled huge trees for lumber and fuel, when we washed and polished the chandeliers, when we bleached and pressed the linens purchased by blood profits from our daily forced laborings, when we lived under the whip and in between the coffle and chains, when we watched our babies sold away from us, when we lost our men to anybody’s highest bidder, when slavery defined our days and our prayers and our nighttimes of no rest–then we did not need affirmative action.
Like two-legged livestock we cost the bossman three hundred and fifteen dollars or six hundred and seventy-five dollars so he provided for our keep like two-legged livestock penned into the parched periphery of very grand plantation life. We did not need affirmative action. NO! We needed freedom: We needed overthrow, revolution and a holy fire to purify the air. But for two hundred years this crazy land the law and the bullets behind the law continued to affirm the gospel of God-given White supremacy. For two hundred years the law and the bullets behind the law, and the money and the politics behind the bullets behind the law affirmed the gospel of God-given White supremacy/ God-given male-White supremacy.
And neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the Civil War nor one constitutional amendment after another nor one Civil Rights legislation after another could bring about a yielding of the followers of that gospel to the beauty of our human face.
Justice don’t mean nothin’ to a hateful heart!
And so we needed affirmative action. We needed a way into the big house besides the back door. We needed a chance at the classroom and jobs and open housing in okay neighborhoods. We needed a way around the hateful hearts of America. We needed more than freedom because a piece of paper ain’t the same as opportunity or education. And some thirty years ago we agitated and we agitated until the President said, “We seek… not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.”
And a great rejoicing rose like a spirit dancing fresh and happy on the soon-to-be-the- integrated-and-most-uppity ballroom floor of these United States. And Black folks everywhere dressed up in African-American pride and optimism. From the littlest to the elders we shined our shoes and brushed our hair and got good and ready for “equality as a fact.” But three decades later, and come to find out we never got invited to the party we never got included in “the people” we never got no kind of affirmative action worth more than a spit in the wind.
And yesterday the new man in the White House/ the new President declared,”What we have done for women and minorities is a good thing, but we must respond to those who feel discriminated against…This is a psychologically difficult time for the so-called angry White man.” Well I am here to tell the world that 46 percent of my children living in poverty does not feel good to me and my brothers in prison and not in college does not feel good to me psychologically or otherwise!
Catch that angry White man and tell him “Get a grip!”
Forty-six percent of the American labor force is constituted by White men but White men occupy 95 percent of all senior management positions! And as a wise Black man recently observed “This supposedly beleaguered minority (White males are about one-third of the population) makes up 80 percent of the Congress, four-fifths of tenured university faculty, nine-tenths of the Senate and 92 percent of the Forbes 400.”
Tell me who’s angry!
I say the problem with affirmative action seems to me like way too much affirmative talk and way too little action!
And unless you happen to belong to that infinitesimal club of millionaire Black folks got one hundred and eight thousand dollars to throw into the campaign pot of their nearest and dearest full-time political racist, I think you better join with me to agitate and agitate for justice and equality we can eat and pay the rent with NOW.
While it’s hard to survive difficult times, it’s also hard to open ourselves to those moments when things get better. That’s the position that we find ourselves in at the moment. While Covid continues to ravage us and we witness acts of white supremacist terrorism, we also see the prospect of mass vaccinations and a Joe Biden presidency. “After we’ve lain in the dark crying out/ O God, save us from the horror…,” in “The Love of Morning” Denise Levertov observes observes it’s hard “to drag ourselves back to the love of morning.”
To be sure, it’s less difficult if that morning is a beautiful spring day and “we wake to birdsong.” We have no doubt in those moments that “God has saved the world one more day/ even with its leaden burden of human evil.” But what if the morning is gray and overcast? What if, rather than experiencing “morning in America” (to quote Ronald Reagan) or “hope and change” (Barack Obama), we discover that recovering from the Trump years is a painful slog? What if, to quote from Levertov’s “Oblique Prayer,” we find ourselves in a world that lacks “clear outlines,
the air heavy and thick
the soft ground clogging my feet if I walk, sucking them downwards if I stand.
The contrast between a sunny day and a gray one reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s challenge in his essay “Nature.” We shouldn’t rely on “the sun or the summer alone,” he tells us, for “every hour and season yields its tribute of delight”:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think how glad I am.
So yes, it will be hard “to love again,” just as it is hard for an abused partner to love again. Nevertheless, the morning “calls us, calls us,” and it is up to us to listen to “our own hunger, the dear tasks of continuance, the footsteps before us in the earth’s beloved dust.” It is up to us to overcome our sloth and to follow.
The Love of Morning
It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves back to the love of morning after we’ve lain in the dark crying out O God, save us from the horror. . . .
God has saved the world one more day even with its leaden burden of human evil; we wake to birdsong. And if sunlight’s gossamer lifts in its net the weight of all that is solid, our hearts, too, are lifted, swung like laughing infants;
but on gray mornings, all incident—our own hunger, the dear tasks of continuance, the footsteps before us in the earth’s belovéd dust, leading the way—all, is hard to love again for we resent a summons that disregards our sloth, and this calls us, calls us
The horrific attack on the Capitol overshadowed another remarkable event that occurred last week, which was the election of a black Democratic senator in a former Confederate state. While Rev. Raphael Warnock is not the first black southern senator to be elected in recent years—there is also Republican Tim Scott in South Carolina—he is the first who has made racial justice a key component of his campaign. Unlike Scott, who received few black votes, Warnock benefitted from Stacy Abrams’s robust get-out-the-vote effort, which succeeded in spite of GOP voter suppression efforts.
To honor the occasion, here’s a Jacqueline Woodson poem looking back at the Civil Rights movement, without which Warnock could not have been elected. While Woodson chooses Feb. 12, 1963 because it was the day she was born, 1963 was also the defining year of the Civil Rights movement. 1963 saw Martin Luther’s King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the bombing that killed four girls in a Birmingham church. It also saw John F. Kennedy sending the National Guard to the University of Alabama when George Wallace attempted to prevent black students from entering.
Warnock, it so happens, was himself born in the 1960s (in 1969), a year after King was assassinated. Warnock has followed in King’s footsteps, having been pastor of King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Woodson’s image of rivers running through her veins undoubtedly alludes to Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which concludes, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Although born in Ohio, Woodson recognizes the importance of her southern roots.
February 12, 1963 By Jacqueline Woodson
I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital Columbus, Ohio, USA— a country caught between Black and White.
I am born not long from the time or far from the place where my great-great-grandparents worked the deep rich land unfree dawn till dusk unpaid drank cool water from scooped-out gourds looked up and followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom.
I am born as the South explodes, too many people too many years enslaved, then emancipated but not free, the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed so that today— February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want.
I am born in Ohio but the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.
“Shoot if you must this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag,” she said.
Thursday
Given how important flags were to the Capitol Hill insurrectionists last week, here’s John Greenleaf’s Whittier’s poem about how a true patriot wields a flag. I remember the poem vividly from my childhood.
Among the worst things recorded during the Capitol invasion is a man with an American flag beating a Capitol police officer with the pole to which it is attached. Another video clip shows Trump rioters tearing down an American flag to replace it with a Trump flag.
We also see see rioters carrying Confederate flags into the Capitol, the first time that the symbol of secession has entered those hallowed halls. And let’s not forget that, over the summer, the Trump campaign actually replaced an American flag with a Blues Lives Matter flag at a Wisconsin rally.
There’s also the tragic-comic story of the rioter who, after entering the Capitol carrying the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of 1775, died when she was trampled during the melee.
In Whittier’s poem, which my grandson and I read on Monday, 90-year-old Barbara Frietchie witnesses her Frederick, Maryland neighbors pulling down their American flags as General Stonewall Jackson and his “famished rebel horde” approaches the city. As Whittier recounts,
Forty flags with their silver stars, Forty flags with their crimson bars,
Flapped in the morning wind: the sun Of noon looked down, and saw not one.
In Friday’s civics poetry lesson, Alban and I learned from Ralph Waldo Emerson that a nation is strong when it has “brave men who work while others sleep,/ Who dare while others fly.” Frietchie proves to be one of these brave men:
Bravest of all in Frederick town, She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set, To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Then, after Jackson orders the men to fire upon the flag,
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;
She leaned far out on the window-sill, And shook it forth with a royal will.
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
Unlike today’s rebels, the Confederate general shows a glimmer of remorse and accords his opponent some respect:
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame, Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred To life at that woman’s deed and word:
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
As a result, the star-spangled banner continues to wave:
All day long that free flag tost Over the heads of the rebel host.
Ever its torn folds rose and fell On the loyal winds that loved it well;
And through the hill-gaps sunset light Shone over it with a warm good-night.
Let us remember this moment, the poet tells us:
Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er, And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.
Honor to her! and let a tear Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.
Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!
Peace and order and beauty draw Round thy symbol of light and law;
And ever the stars above look down On thy stars below in Frederick town!
We could only wish that the GOP would show the same kind of respect for their Democratic foes as Jackson does. And experience a momentary blush of shame for trying to steal the election.
While sharing these poems with Alban, I thought back to my own citizenship education. In addition to reading and sometimes memorizing poems like this, each morning we pledged allegiance to the flag. I don’t understand why some liberals object to the pledge given that it ends with the resounding declaration “with liberty and justice for all.” That powerful vision, reaffirming the words of The Declaration of Independence, are an integral part of what makes us a nation.
To be sure, we fall short of that vision all the time, but that’s not the flag’s fault. The pledge makes clear that the flag “stands” for our republic, which is “one nation, under God, indivisible.” We can be disappointed by how the republic falls short but not by the ideal itself.
As for “God,” which some people object to, think of it as the transcendent non-material spirit that guides us. Unless you are Hobbesian materialist who sees all relations defined by self-interest or a Foucauldian who reduces everything to power struggle, your idealism will have a spiritual component.
Flag of freedom and union, symbol of light and law, long may you wave. Those who use you for base purposes are the true desecrators.
Further thought: While we honor people who stands up to the forces of sedition, let’s recall Eugene Goodman, the black Capitol cop who lured rioters away from the Senate chambers while it still held members of Congress. By making himself a decoy, he may well have saved people from being held hostage or even killed.
According to the Washington Post,a colleague observed that Goodman “was diverting people from getting on the Senate floor and getting hostages. It was the smartest thing that he could have ever done. I don’t know that many people who can think on their feet like that. . . . His quick thinking enabled those Senators to get to safety.” One tactic he employed was prodding the lead rioter with his baton at just the moment when the mob could have turned right and discovered the Senate floor. Instead they chased him up the stairs, where he had reinforcements waiting.
Since last March, I’ve been FaceTime tutoring my Washington, D.C. grandson in poetry. Alban enjoyed the sessions so much that we continued them through the summer and haven’t stopped. Following last week’s horrific Capitol insurrection, I decided to focus on poetry as civics lesson.
Not that this eight-year-old is all that aware of what is going on. His parents, worried about frightening him, are calling the insurrectionists “protestors” rather than what they really are. They haven’t told him about the violence or the deaths.
Nevertheless, I figured it was important to emphasize certain national core values. I chose Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “A Nation’s Strength,” and Lanston Hughes’s “I Too Sing America.”
I remember a music teacher from my elementary school days teaching us a musical version of “New Colossus.” The lines found on the Statue of Liberty made an impression on me, and they seemed to resonate with Alban as well. We talked about how America is an immigrant nation and how Alban’s mother, adopted when a South Korean baby, was part of that history.
To set the stage of Lazarus’s poem, I told Alban about the Colossus of Rhodes and we talked about how the Statue of Liberty, looking over Alban’s Manhattan birth place, was our own great statue. We discussed the hopes that America would be a beacon to all who are suffering:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Moving on to Emerson, I asked Alban what makes a nation strong. His answer—everyone working together—is not far from the poet’s answer. To prepare him for the poem’s structure, I engaged in a little call and response. Are we strong because we are so wealthy? No! Are we strong because we have the world’s strongest military? No! Are we strong because we feel we are special? No. Why are we strong? Because we work together.
What makes a nation’s pillars high And its foundations strong? What makes it mighty to defy The foes that round it throng?
It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand Go down in battle shock; Its shafts are laid on sinking sand, Not on abiding rock.
Is it the sword? Ask the red dust Of empires passed away; The blood has turned their stones to rust, Their glory to decay.
And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown Has seemed to nations sweet; But God has struck its luster down In ashes at his feet.
Not gold but only men can make A people great and strong; Men who for truth and honor’s sake Stand fast and suffer long.
Brave men who work while others sleep, Who dare while others fly… They build a nation’s pillars deep And lift them to the sky.
Emerson’s vision of heroic self-reliance appealed to Alban, who wants to do the right thing. He thrills at the prospect of challenge.
Alban’s favorite poem of the three was Hughes’s “I, Too. ” Less formal than the other two, it speaks to his vision of working together. It speaks to a different kind of strength:
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.
Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
Hughes doesn’t regard himself as “wretched refuse” but, no less than Emma Lazarus, he aspires to America’s golden door. Or as he calls it in multiple poems, the “dream deferred. From our lesson Alban received a vision of opening ourselves to others and standing strong for truth and honor.
America needs all of us to affirm these values during these perilous times.
Since I’ve encountered multiple references to Macbeth since the Capitol insurrection, it’s worth returning to the play. The more details that emerge about the event, the more Macbethian it appears. Apparently hostage taking and possibly executions were planned for certain members of Congress, and only the quick wits of a Capitol police officer kept the insurrectionists from bursting through doors of the Senate chamber while members were still in it.
Even Trump sycophant Mike Pence was a target after telling Trump it was not in his power to throw out the election results. Think of him as the Banquo of our drama.
The play, as we all know, is about a general who kills his king and then, in a classic rightwing maneuver, blames it on Antifa—excuse me, I mean the king’s two servants—whom he summarily slaughters. He gets the idea from three witches who can be regarded has projections of his own fevered imagination. Like Trump and the GOP, Macbeth and his wife sell their souls for power.
Once having achieved it, however, their paranoia only grows. Macbeth reasons that, if he himself is willing to kill for a kingship, than Banquo will be as well:
Thus, like Trump complaining to his thugs know about Pence’s “betrayal,” Macbeth sends two murderers forth to dispatch his loyal companion. Like Trump, Macbeth retains plausible deniability of what they are to do:
It should be noted that Banquo, while generally contrasted with Macbeth, is not entirely innocent. While, like Pence, he knows his leader has been up to no good, he let’s his own ambitions silence his qualms. After all, the witches have told him that his heirs will be kings:
Having killed Banquo, Macbeth finds himself alone in his last battle. Meanwhile, in a passage I’ve seen applied to Trump’s allies, Lady Macbeth finds she cannot wash away the stain of her part in her husband’s treason:
Lady Macbeth: Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?–Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.
Although Trump’s GOP enablers are using disinformation tactics to distance themselves from the blood that has stained the Capitol, Shakespeare here points out that some stains go too deep to wash away.
In the past when I’ve made Trump-Macbeth comparisons, I’ve warned against seeing him as a tragic hero. His drama has been more farce than tragedy. Unlike Macbeth, Trump doesn’t lead his followers into battle but remains behind to watch the events on video. Macbeth at least has the capacity for self-reflection—“Life’s but a walking shadow”—whereas Trump is guided only by his narcissism. When Birnham Wood rises to administer an election defeat, Trump calls it fake news.
Reader Matthew Currie has alerted me to a powerful Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that gets a some of the fragility many of us currently sense in the American experiment. “Underground System” was written in 1939 when Millay herself was feeling fragile, both because of the rise of fascism and the repercussions of a car accident.
Like many Americans, all my life I have assumed that this nation’s foundational principles were solid. I recognize that in some ways this speaks to my privileged existence as a middle-class white man, but it’s not only whites that have been shocked. I think of my black students’ dismay following Trump’s election: they thought they were living in Obama’s America, only to discover that a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, billionaire conman could be elected president.
As white insurrectionists desecrated the Capitol building, I thought of Marx’s lyrical description of capitalism shredding the old order: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned…” The passage itself borrows an image from Prospero’s speech in The Tempest:
I’m not yet prepared to concede that white supremacists are spelling the end of American democracy, symbolized by our own cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, and solemn temples. I do admit to Millay’s uneasiness, however. The “crust of the world” is thinner than I realized:
Set the foot down with distrust upon the crust of the world – it is thin. Moles are at work beneath us; they have tunneled the sub-soil With separate chambers; which at an appointed knock Could be as one, could intersect and interlock. We walk on the skin Of life. No toil Of rake or hoe, no lime, no phosphate, no rotation of crops, no irrigation of the land, Will coax the limp and flattened grain to stand On that bad day, or feed to strength the nibbled roots of our nation.
Ease has demoralized us, nearly so; we know Nothing of the rigors of winter: the house has a roof against – the car a top against – the snow. All will be well, we say; it is a habit, like the rising of the sun, For our country to prosper; who can prevail against us? No one.
The house has a roof; but the boards of its floor are rotting, and hall upon hall The moles have built their palace beneath us: we have not far to fall.
Since the Capitol’s desecration, we have learned that many of the insurrectionists were well off, with many having incomes well over over $100,000. In other words, they know “nothing of the rigors of winter.” But if ease has not demoralized them, it has at least provided them with an environment where their paranoid fantasies can run wild. People who work two jobs a day to sustain themselves don’t have hours to spend on Nazi internet sites.
Because we are the world’s preeminent military power, no other nation can “prevail against us,” but at such moments our floorboards seem to be rotting. To borrow from the poem, it’s all very well to say that all will be well, acting as though it’s inevitable that our country will prosper. The January 6 insurrection, however, warns us that moles eat away at our foundations.
