Trump and Trumpism have proved so abhorrent that new liberal-conservative alliances have formed amongst those concerned about the future of our democratic republic, and I suddenly find myself applauding people I’ve disagreed with for years, such as Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, William Krystol, Steve Schmidt, Kurt Bardella, Joe Scarsborough, Michael Steele, Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, and others. Above all, I admire David Frum, a conservative with integrity with whom one can have respectful conversations. I only recently learned that he’s a huge fan of Marcel Proust, to whom he owes some of his most profound insights.
In 2010 Frum quoted the following Proust passage in response to comparable political shifts going on at the time:
In the days of my early childhood … no ‘good’ house would ever have opened its doors to a Republican. … But, like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern. Before I had made my first Communion, ladies on the ‘right side’ in politics had had the stupefaction of meeting, while paying calls, a smart [ie fashionable] Jewess. These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a ‘change of criterion.’ The Dreyfus case brought about another …. Everything Jewish, even the smart lady herself, fell out of the pattern, and various obscure nationalities appeared in its place. The most brilliant drawing-room in Paris was that of a Prince who was an Austrian and ultra-Catholic. If instead of the Dreyfus case there had come a war with Germany, the base of the kaleidoscope would have been turned in the other direction, and its pattern reversed. The Jews having shewn, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots also, would have kept their position, and no one would have cared to go any more, or even to admit that he had ever gone to the Austrian Prince’s.
Frum then identifies a few of the shifts he’s witnessed:
We see these kaleidoscope twists continuing into our own day. Feminists turn into anti-pornography activists and make common cause with the religious conservatives they once despised. Pro-lifers engage with end-of-life issues and find alliances with Naderite critics of for-profit medicine. One-time anticommunists are jolted by 9/11 into transferring their admiration from anti-Soviet mujahedeen to anti-jihadist secular Muslims.
And then the kaleidoscope twists again, and again old alliances and relationships mutate into strange and unexpected forms. A town like Greenwich, CT can drift from ultra-Republican in 1985 to super-Democratic in 2005. John L. Lewis’ Appalachia is the only part of the country to become more Republican between 2004 and 2008.
Frum concludes his essay with the following gem:
The great lesson Marcel Proust tries to impart is the mutability of human life. That lesson applies to politics too. Coalitions combine, separate, recombine. Nothing remains unchanged, no matter how solid it may seem. Or, as Proust concludes at the end of Swann’s Way: “Houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
As I noted in Tuesday’s post, profound insights occur when political scientists draw on literature. Frum is another case in point.
The GOP has long mastered the art of Catch-22 but it may just have surpassed itself. Before I turn to the incident I have in mind, Heller’s definition is in order:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
I have written about how, following the Las Vegas mass killing, the GOP said that a regulatory fix rather than legislation was needed to control bump fire stocks used by mass killers. The problem: they wouldn’t grant the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) the authority to regulate bump stocks. Nevertheless, House Speaker Paul Ryan sounded oh-so-reasonable about it.
And then there are the anti-abortion TRAP laws. In some states, abortion doctors are forced to have medically unnecessary admitting privileges at local hospitals which then–perhaps because of religious affiliation or political pressure–don’t grant them admitting privileges.
Mitch McConnell’s latest is a doozie. He doesn’t want to be seen as letting Donald Trump off the hook for inciting open sedition but he also doesn’t want to alienate Trump supporters. What does he do? First, as Senate Majority Leader, he refused to reconvene the Senate before January 19 to conduct Trump’s trial. Then, turning the Constitution into a Catch-22 document, he voted for a GOP motion contending Trump’s trial is unconstitutional because he’s no longer in office.
As New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait sarcastically sums up the effect of McConnell’s maneuver,
Nobody is defending the insurrection. It merely happens to have taken place during a wormhole in the calendar in which a president can violate the law with complete impunity. They would like very much to hold Trump accountable, but the founders designed the Presidential Crime Wormhole, and we must respect their wisdom.
Wormhole or Catch-22, it all comes down to one thing: those who have the power can make rules which, while they give off the aura of being even-handed, are in reality just designed to screw the rest of us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
