Trump: Hemingway Wastrel, Le Carré Con

By Robin Bates | Published: January 26, 2021
Errol Flynn as Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises

Wednesday

Here’s a literary citation that reminds us of the usefulness of an extensive literary background when writing about politics. Attempting to assess Donald Trump’s future, New Yorker’s John Cassady turns to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

[S]omeone asks Mike Campbell, the troubled Scottish war veteran who is engaged to Lady Brett Ashley, how he ended up bankrupt. “Two ways,” Campbell replies. “Gradually, and then suddenly.” Campbell’s interlocutor goes on to ask what brought about his collapse. “Friends,” Campbell says. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”

We’ll get a chance to see, during the upcoming impeachment trial and then in the ensuing months, how many of those who supported and enabled the president are false friends. Given that most of them, like their leader, are purely transactional, we’ll recognize their falsity only to the extent that Trump’s influence declines.  Unfortunately, given that the it will probably be perceived self-interest rather than principle that decides. But it’s clear that economically, Trump’s creditors are beginning to kick back.

And further on:

[I]n the week since Trump incited a mob of his supporters to attack the Capitol, he and his businesses have suffered a series of blows. Key corporate partners have abandoned him; some of his fellow-billionaires have spoken out against his sedition; Deutsche Bank has let it be known that it doesn’t want anything more to do with him; and Twitter stripped him of his following. When Trump leaves the White House, next week, he may have his eyes on planning a return to the political stage, but surely his first priority will be stabilizing his business empire—if he can manage it.

If the corporate shunning of Trump persists and expands to other businesses owned by him, it could do immense damage. Trump’s hotels and resorts, such as the Trump National Doral, in Miami, depend on big businesses to fill their ballrooms and function spaces. They also rely on wealthy individuals to book the tee times, hotel rooms, and weddings that provide daily revenues. His condo developments cater to wealthy buyers. Other Trump ventures, particularly his licensing deals around the world, are even more dependent on the enduring appeal of the Trump brand, which is now in question. 

Trump and Campbell have one other thing in common, which is their fragile masculinity. The resemblances end there, however, as Campbell has contempt for medals (whereas Trump longs for them), is self-deprecating (enough said on that score), and drinks heavily (whereas Trump doesn’t drink at all). Also unlike Trump, he’s a good companion (when he’s doesn’t get too drunk) who wears his humanity on his sleeve, especially in his longing for Lady Ashley Brett.

On the other hand, Trump is very much like the father (Rick) in a John le Carré novel I’m reading at the moment. (A friend recommended A Perfect Spy to me after le Carré’s recent death.) Here’s a recollection written by Rick’s son, who refers to his childhood self as Pym. It describes Rick and his black market activities during World War II (which Rick escaped as neatly as Trump escaped Vietnam):

Rick’s superiority was manifest in everything he did. In the way he dressed even when we were very broke, his clean laundry and clean shoes. In the food he required and the style to eat it in. The rooms he had in the hotel. In the way he needed brandy for his snooker, and scared everyone into silence with his brooding…

Meanwhile we traded. What in, Pym never rightly knew and nor do I now. Sometimes in rare commodities, such as hams and whisky, sometimes in promises, which the court called faith. Other times in nothing more solid than the sunny horizons that sparkled ahead of us down the empty wartime roads.

Rick also makes a fortune at one point with a fraudulent insurance scheme, using his charm to sell policies to the elderly. At another point he gets money for buildings during the war (but gets caught when one of the buildings proves to be undamaged).

I thought of Trump steaks, Trump University, and Trump presidential promises. Rick’s weakness for horses also reminds us of Trump’s longing to be the owner of a football franchise.

Supposedly le Carré modeled Rick on his own father. After four years of Trump, we know he knows whereof he speaks.

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The City on the Hill Requires Climbing

By Robin Bates | Published: January 25, 2021
Amanda Gorman at the Inauguration

Tuesday

With American democracy under threat, I’ve been teaching civics-through-poetry to my eight-year-old grandson, so of course we had to look at “The Hill We Climb,” the Amanda Gorman poem that galvanized the nation during the inauguration.

I like what Washington Post’s Karen Attiah had to say about Gorman’s reading. As important as Biden’s speech was, Gorman’s poem drove home the hope many of us were feeling:

[S]he was not a luxury. The purifying power of poetry has existed as long as humans have wielded words. And for women especially, as [poet Audre] Lorde said, poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence.” Biden’s inaugural words about unity and coming together were good and helpful and presidential. But it was Gorman’s truth that was the necessary one.

Necessary for Black women in America. In a country that so loves to profit from our political, cultural and emotional labor, Gorman reminded those of us who live at the intersection of sexism and racism that we do not have the luxury of settling for hollow #BlackWomenWillSaveUs platitudes. Not when this country is unable to save us from discrimination, police brutality or dying in childbirth.

I was struck how readily Gorman rose to the challenge of occasional poetry (poetry written for a special occasion), which used to be common expectation (and income source) for poets in centuries past but has fallen out of fashion. She succeeded in part by channeling the voice of previous African American orators and poets. Her “we will rise” refrain, for instance, echoes both Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (“this nation will rise up”) and Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”

America as a city on a hill, of course, has a long tradition, stemming back to John Withrop’s injunction to build a civilization where “the eyes of all people are upon us.” John Kennedy invoked the image shortly after being elected, as did Ronald Reagan. Gorman’s focus is on climbing that hill, climbing having its own rich history within the African American community, from the Negro spiritual “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” to Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.” Hughes’s poem concludes,

So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now —
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

And then there’s the late Naomi Long Madgett’s “Midway,” which I wrote about recently https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/mountains-loom-before-me-and-i-wont-stop-now/and which concludes with the line, “Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.”

In Gorman’s poem, my grandson particularly liked the lines,

[B]eing American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it,
that would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy,
and this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can periodically be delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.

He also felt inspired and personally challenged by the closing lines:

[W]hen the day comes we step out of the shade
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it,
for there is always light
if only we’re brave enough to see it,
if only we’re brave enough
to be it.

Think of how much we want young people to encounter this idealism.

Discussing the poem in light of the Capitol Hill seditionists, Alban and I found comfort in Gorman’s confidence in the future. (Alban said, “Wow!” while watching a video of her delivering “The Hill We Climb.”) We also looked at the poem’s style. While written in free verse (no regular rhyme or rhythm), it does have a few rhymes (the best ones are often female, such as “inherit,” “repair it,” and “share it”), along with puns and alliteration. I challenged Alban to find the largest alliterative cluster, which he did (“to compose a country committed/ to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man”).

I’ve only found prose transcriptions of the poem—none laid out on the page as it will be in Gorman’s forthcoming collection—so what I share here is my approximation.

The Hill We Climb
By Amanda Gorman

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned
that quiet isn’t always peace
and the norms and notions of what just is,
isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it,
somehow we do it,
somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time
where a skinny black girl descended from slaves
and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one.
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,
but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union
that is perfect,
we are striving to forge a union
with purpose,
to compose a country committed
to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another,
we seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
that even as we grieved, we grew,
even as we hurt, we hoped,
that even as we tired, we tried,
that we’ll forever be tied together victorious,
not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
and no one should make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade,
but in in all of the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade,
the hill we climb
if only we dare it
because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it,
that would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy,
and this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can periodically be delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future,
history has its eyes on us,
this is the era of just redemption we feared in its inception
we did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter,
to offer hope and laughter to ourselves,
so while once we asked
how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe,
now we assert
how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.

We will not march back to what was
but move to what shall be,
a country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold, fierce and free,
we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation,
our blunders become their burden.
But one thing is certain: if we merge mercy with might
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better
than the one we were left,
with every breath from my bronze, pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one,
we will rise
from the golden hills of the West,
we will rise
from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution,
we will rise
from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states,
we will rise
from the sunbaked South,
we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover
in every known nook of our nation
in every corner called our country
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge
battered and beautiful,
when the day comes we step out of the shade
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it,
for there is always light
if only we’re brave enough to see it,
if only we’re brave enough
to be it.

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Dante on Life beyond Resentment

By Robin Bates | Published: January 24, 2021
Hyppolite Flandrin, Dante Speaks to the Souls of the Envious

Monday

As we look ahead to President Biden’s challenges, the major one may be reactionary resentment. Although it is clear that we need high levels of federal spending to address Covid needs and skyrocketing unemployment, right on cue the GOP is throwing up roadblocks. After running up the deficit with profligate tax cuts for the wealthy, Republican legislators are declaring that America can’t afford to help those in need.

I’m wondering whether Dante’s Purgatorio offers a credible case for optimism. On the second terrace (cantos XIII-XV), we encounter formerly resentful souls who have seen the light.

Dante doesn’t underestimate the power of resentment and neither should we. It has proven noxious throughout U.S. history, possessing as it does both an economic and a racial component. Since immigrants, upon arriving, witnessed African Americans at the bottom of the social scale, they came to see a caste system as part of the American Dream. Success meant that you at least rose higher than they did, which meant that black success could be experienced as threatening. After all, if African Americans do better than you, then you are a failure, which is why many regarded the Obama presidency as an existential threat. The resentment directed toward the first black president was something to behold.

Even our country’s successes have been built on the back of this resentment. Whites have embraced government programs as long as Blacks have been excluded, as was the case with both Roosevelt’s Social Security and the post-World War II GI bill. Johnson’s anti-poverty and affirmative action programs and Obama’s Affordable Care Act fueled backlash.

Resentment, which is inextricably bound up with envy, is not just a lower class vice. The very wealthy can be resentful, as we saw with Trump’s envious resentment of Obama. Some of the GOP’s billionaire backers appear maddened by it. They resemble Dante’s wealthy Sapia of Siena.

Sapia tells Dante that, when alive, her “heart conceived more joy from others’ loss than my own gain.” For instance, she rejoiced when her own countrymen were conquered by the invading Florentines:

Beaten they were, and fled in bitter rout;
And there thrilled through me, when I saw the chase,
Such glee as till that hour I’d tasted not.

The passage reminds me of Envy’s self description in Doctor Faustus:

I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt. I am lean with seeing others eat. O, that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone! then thou shouldst see how fat I would be. But must thou sit, and I stand? come down, with a vengeance!

Better to burn everything down than learn to read and collectively increase food production.

Guido del Duca is similarly resentful:

And in my heart such envy used to burn,
If I’d caught someone looking pleased with life,
Thou wouldst have seen how livid I could turn.

Looking back, he wonders–as Biden must wonder–why humans turn against each other instead of working together in partnership:

I reap the straw whose seed I sowed so rife;
Why, why set heart on things which must forbid
All partnership, O human race at strife?

The envious in Purgatory have had their eyelids wired shut, a sign that they cannot see God’s mercy and generosity. Aglauros, a jealous sister in Roman mythology who was turned to stone when she denied Mercury access to her sister, describes this limited vision:

The high heavens call you and about you wheel,
Showing eternal beauties to invite you;
But all you see’s the earth beneath your heel,

And therefore doth the All discerning smite you.

If your envy means more to you than God’s gifts, you create your own hell.

I promised some optimism so here it is. These souls are in Purgatory, not Inferno, which means that they aren’t absolutely stuck in their resentment. Static though our politics may seem, people are capable of moving to a better place. Sapia shifted when a celebrated hermit beyond the reach of envy “showered his holy prayers upon me.”

Expressing remorse for resentment will get you to Purgatory, but opening yourself to the Angel of Generosity will get you to Paradise. This angel is so dazzling that the pilgrim Dante at first must shade his eyes:

So, from before me, on these eyes of mine
Such a reflected brilliance seemed to smite
That they shrank promptly from the blinding shine.

“O my dear father, what is this so bright,
No effort serves to screen it off,” said I,
“And moving toward us, if I guess aright?”

Virgil explains that it takes time to embrace generosity:

Full soon, to look on beings such as this
Shall be to thee no burden, but a cause
Of all thy nature can endure of bliss.

Like many resentful Americans, Dante is not there yet. How, he wonders, can we get more by sharing? What did Guido del Duca mean by “partnership”?

Virgil explains that he must think beyond material possession. I love his bellows metaphor:

You set desire where sharing with one’s fellows
Means that each partner gets a smaller share,
Wherefore you sigh, and envy works the bellows.

Did but the love of the most lofty sphere
Turn your desires to take the upward way,
Your hearts were quit of all the fearful care;

Because the more there are who there can say
“Ours,” the more goods each has, and charity
Burns in that cloister with a larger ray.

For a while, Dante still fails to get it:

How can it be that, when a greater throng
Divides the goods, there is more wealth for each
Than if a few possessed them all along?

Virgil tries again:

Because once more thy mental reach
Stops short at earthly things, thy dullard mood
From truth’s own light draws darkness black as pitch.

If the envious were only to see the “infinite and unexpressive” generosity of God, Virgil explains, then they would no longer be stuck in themselves. The scales—or in this case, wires—would fall from their eyes.

The beauty of one who is “lavish of self”—who gives generously—is so dazzling that envy is swept aside. “All fires it finds it feeds,” Virgil says and then explains that, with more acts of charity, more people experience God’s love. Enamored souls function as mirrors to each other, multiplying the love:

The more enamored souls dwell there at once,
Ever the better and the more they love
Each glassing each, all mirrors and all suns.

A major theme of the Divine Comedy is that Virgil, representing Reason, can only take Dante so far. Divine love, represented by Beatrice, must clinch the insight. Once Dante opens his heart to love, Virgil tells him, the earthly cravings that feed envy will fall away:

Now, should my words thy hunger not remove,
Beatrice shalt thou see, and she’ll speak plain,
This and all cravings else to rid thee of.

And indeed, when Dante catches a glimpse of Beatrice, he is thrown into a “trance of ecstasy.” He finally gets in his heart what Virgil has been trying to communicate to his reason.

How does this apply to our moment in history? Well, the United States is a wealthy nation and has the capacity to share its resources. It could enact universal health care and affordable college and affordable childcare and a living minimum wage. It could subsidize those who are currently unemployed due to the pandemic. It could be generous.

This will mean the wealthiest amongst us giving up some of what they have. (They can afford it. Our current level of income equality matches that of the Gilded Age.) Virgil tells Dante that moving from “mine” to “ours”–what the GOP is calling socialism–leads to a far richer life than our internecine struggles.

Sapia of Siena gets a glimpse of this life before she dies, which is why she is in Purgatory. If, in a Biden administration, Trump supporters get a glimpse of the Angel of Generosity—of how much richer life can be when one’s eyes aren’t wired shut—then we all can start imagining a collective future together.

Further thought: Colleague John Reishman in our Dante discussion group points out that, because their eyes are wired shut, the envious can only get along through cooperation. They, like we, must learn to acknowledge how much we need each other if they are to move on to Paradise.

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Out of Pain We Feed This Feverish Plot

By Robin Bates | Published: January 23, 2021
Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Calling of Peter and Andrew (1308-1311)

Spiritual Sunday

As today’s Gospel reading is Jesus inviting Peter and Andrew to follow him and become “fishers of men” (“fish for people” in the New International Version), I share a Mary Oliver fish poem. It took me a while to realize how religious a poet Oliver because they seldom resorts to religious terminology. Nevertheless, I think “The Fish” is, among other things, a description of the eucharist.

My sister-in-law Elizabeth Barrett, who is an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, has a self-deprecating UU joke involving Oliver. UUs are so open to the wisdom literature of all faiths, Mohammed or Buddha no less than Jesus, that Elizabeth says they wired with an automatic translation system. If they are asked, for instance, whether they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, they hear, “Are you inspired by the poetry of Mary Oliver?” and readily answer, “Yes!”

Oliver was herself a practicing Episcopalian but I agree with Elizabeth that the poet translates well across faiths. She especially falls within an American literary tradition, seen also in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson, of finding God in nature. In “The Fish,” one encounters images of violence and death follow by an initiation into mystery. In the eucharist, we symbolically devour the flesh of Christ and drink of his blood in order that we may be one with him.

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

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Move Past Trump, Embrace the Morning

By Robin Bates | Published: January 21, 2021
Fritz Eichenberg, illus. from Wuthering Heights

Friday

My wife Julia reported herself “rattled” following the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Wednesday. She has been angrily pushing against Trump for so long, she said, that his sudden absence has unsettled her.

People emerging from abusive relationships often feel this way, I observed, and referred her to the Denise Levertov poem I shared this past Sunday. “It is hard sometimes,” the poet writes,

                       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. . . .

For fictional moments where people suddenly emerge into the sunlight, I think of the final scene in Carlos Saura’s movie Cria Cuervos (1976). A little girl, living in a dark, oppressive house where she has witnessed wrenching family trauma for the entirety of the film, emerges into the sunlight at the end, heading for school and a normal life. The film was made following the death of Spanish dictator Ferdinand Franco.

The concluding paragraphs of Wuthering Heights also speak to such times. Lockwood has just witnessed the final chapter of the Earnshaws, Lintons, and Heathcliffs, whose family history was once filled with frustrated passion and seething rage where people tore each other apart. The storm has subsided, however, concluding with the far calmer marriage between young Catherine and Hareton. Lockwood thinks back to the previous generation as he visits their graves:

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

How much time must elapse before we can gaze upon the Trump years with Lockwood’s sense of distance? Step one is watching order return to the the nation and listening to the sounds of orderly government commencing once more. Future generations will have difficulty imagining the unquiet era we have just experienced.

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Boredom + Sadism Drove Trumpists

By Robin Bates | Published: January 20, 2021
Illus. from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa

Thursday

A column by NeverTrumper Tom Nichols helps me understand better many of those who joined the Trump cult and invaded the Capitol last week. We have been witnessing a mixture of boredom and sadism, a dynamic I first became aware of in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa.

I’ve written about Trumpism’s sadistic streak in the past (a shoutout to John Stoehr of Editorial Board). Nichols adds the boredom dimension. Writing about those who invaded the Capitol, the Michigan State House, Charlottesville, and other venues, Nichols says,

These are people – … especially the men – trapped in the eternal drama of adolescence. They are creatures of a leisure society, bored by the ordinariness of life, angry that the world is not more interesting and that others refuse to pay them their heroic due.

Nichols credits Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer for the idea:

As Eric Hoffer noted this is the fetid breeding ground of extremism: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves…Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless.”

Even in 1951, Hoffer knew the danger of society of bored children: “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.” This, not rights or freedom, was what the past years of Trumpism are about

There is no seriousness here, no sense of injustice, no actual injury to rights. Merely the aggrieved boredom of men (and some women) who never learned that life is not ceaselessly interesting and dramatic. That life, even the best life, is boring and repetitive on most days.

Nichols has a simple message for those who have rioted and threatened violence: Grow up!

This is why the legal and social response should be swift and clear. To remind people that life is not a TV show. It is not Twitter dunks and Facebook memes. To show that hurting other people out of boredom and childish narcissism has real consequences.

Real adulthood, Nichols goes on to say, involves “showing up and doing your best no matter what the job is.” Life is most heroic when it is not dramatic, given that it calls for  

[t]aking care of your loved ones, looking after a sick friend, letting someone go ahead of you at a stop sign, holding the door for someone at a store. Adults know this. Stunted, selfish, undisciplined, stupid adolescents do not.

And further on:

I am exhausted by turning on the news and realizing that the blessings of life in a liberal democracy have also produced a stubborn knot of bored children who think guns and flags and dumb slogans will give their lives meaning.

All I can do is suggest to other people in this society to treat these brutal, overgrown adolescents with as much distance as possible. To show them, by example, what stoicism and seriousness look like. To be the adults. I know it’s hard. I’m not consistent about it myself.

But amidst all the calls for unity, it’s important to remember that unity and understanding can only happen between adults who agree to live peaceably. The people who defended sedition – and especially those who instigated it – are not those people. Those are armed toddlers.

Clarissa is the story of a beautiful young woman who, after being pressured by her family to marry an old and awful man with money, is tricked into running away with a rake. He, in turn, holds her captive and, after she repeatedly resists his overtures, drugs her with opium and rapes her. The rest of the novel involves her attempts to escape and the efforts of friends (but not family) to see that justice is done.

The novel has multiple depictions of sadism but the one I have in mind occurs within her family, For page after page we see her parents and siblings taking sadistic delight in tormenting her, which ultimately drive her into the rake’s trap. To give you a taste, here’s her brother writing to her:

By command of your father and mother I write expressly to forbid you to come into their presence, or into the garden when they are there: nor when they are not there, but with Betty Banes to attend you; except by particular license or command…

You are not to enter into the presence of either of your uncles, without their leave first obtained. It is a mercy to you, after such a behavior to your mother, that your father refuses to see you.

You are not to be seen in any apartment of the house you so lately governed as you pleased, unless you are commanded down.

In short, you are strictly to confine yourself to your chamber, except now and then, in Betty Barnes’s sight (as aforesaid) you take a morning or evening turn in the garden: and then you are to go directly, and without stopping at any apartment in the way, up or down the back stairs, that the sight of so perverse a young creature may not add to the pain you have given every body.

The hourly threatenings of your fine fellow, as well as your own unheard-of obstinacy, will account to you for all this. What a hand has the best and most indulgent of mothers had with you, who so long pleaded for you, and undertook for you; even when others, from the manner of your setting out, despaired of moving you!—What must your perverseness have been, that such a mother can give you up! She thinks it right so to do: nor will take you to favor, unless you make the first steps, by a compliance with your duty.

As for myself, whom perhaps you think hardly of [in very good company, if you do, that is my sole consolation]; I have advised, that you may be permitted to pursue your own inclinations, (some people need no greater punishment than such a permission,) and not to have the house encumbered by one who must give them the more pain for the necessity she has laid them under of avoiding the sight of her, although in it.

That boredom explains such behavior I owe to Frederick Karl’s Adversary Literature: The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Genre. Viewing the gentry class as Nichols views pampered Americans, Karl notes the salacious buzz that Clarissa’s family gets from desecrating her purity. After all, he asks, what else is so salacious for members of this pampered gentry class than desecrating Clarissa’s purity. The novel inspired the Marquis de Sade’s Justine: The Misfortunes of Virtue, and although Sade goes to extremes that Richardson would never dream of, the underlying dynamics are the same.

For four years, the world has witnessed a sadistic reality television show, all the more delicious because people actually got hurt in this one. One’s dark gratification could be tickled by stories of children torn away from their parents (a common staple of Sade’s novels) and people of color injured or killed by police. To join this show, one simply had to grab an easily obtainable AK-47 and parade around in military fatigues.

Storming the Capitol while Congress was certifying the election was the season finale, something far more gripping than anything see on Survivor or Jersey Shore. One woman (now under arrest) even flew to Washington in a private plane to take part. And if upright citizens recoiled in horror at the show, well, that just added an extra zing, something comparable to having your parents wave their fingers at you. “Owning the liberals” has been a big part of the fun.

Thinking of the Trump years as a reality television show, however, leads me to another theory of popular entertainment that may provide some hope. In his important book on Film Genre, Rick Altman says that the transgressive thrill we get from watching genre movies is ultimately countered by an intense desire to return to conventional values. For much of the movie, we enjoy watching gangsters commit crimes, monsters cause mayhem, and lovers challenge sexual restrictions.

Then, however, the transgression goes too far and we find ourselves longing for normalcy. We want the gangsters shot or at least locked up, the monsters defeated, the lovers married. What once gave us a rebellious thrill now causes painful anxiety.

History provides many examples of retreats from rebellion. The daring Restoration sexual comedies were followed by the far more conservative theatre of the 18th century; Byron’s Satanic heroes by novels hewing to Victorian morality; the wild energies of early 1930’s Hollywood (Mae West, Universal’s monster movies and Warner Brothers’ gangster films) by the Hayes Code.

I’m hoping that Trumpism’s transgressive energies will be followed by a revulsion that causes America to embrace adult maturity once again. I want troublemakers to be either locked up (when they commit crimes) or laughed out of the arena. I want wannabe Trumps to be socially ostracized. I want the country to go about seriously addressing the issues that matter.

These, of course, include a pandemic that has killed 400,000 Americans and cratered the economy and the climate change that is causing out-of-control wildfires and increasingly destructive hurricanes.

Many conservatives have had their sadistic pleasure centers tickled for four years. Let the good resolutions that follow a hangover begin now.

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The Changing of the Guard

By Robin Bates | Published: January 19, 2021

Wednesday

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.

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When Hate Groups Devour Their Own

By Robin Bates | Published: January 18, 2021
Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son

Tuesday

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.

Believe.

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Angry Black Woman vs. Angry White Men

By Robin Bates | Published: January 17, 2021
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.

Previous Martin Luther King Day posts
2020—Langston Hughes: Hughes and King Dream a World
2019—Beowulf poet: Pelosi-Mueller vs. Grendel-Trump
2018 – Claude McKay: America, Racist and Reactionary Both
2017—Ralph Ellison, Lucille Clifton: We Benefit When We Check Our Privilege
2016—Clint Smith: Black in a White World
2015 – Lucille Clifton: Against Race Oppression, Turn to Love
2014 – May Justus: My Town’s Desegregation Battles
2012 – Nikki Giovanni: In the Spirit of Martin
2011 – Aphra Behn: The Challenges and Necessity of Interracial Friendships
2010— Upton Sinclair: Life before Health Benefits: A Jungle

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