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Thursday
Yesterday my brother died of cancer. I have no words of my own, but this Mark Twain lyric gets at some of what I’m feeling:
Warm summer sun, Shine kindly here, Warm southern wind, Blow softly here. Green sod above, Lie light, lie light. Good night, dear heart, Good night, good night.
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Wednesday
Macbeth’s murder of Duncan is going through my mind as I watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk attempt to murder democracy. Like Macbeth, they believe that a quick and overwhelming strike will do the business and appear to think they can handle any consequences. Or as Macbeth puts it,
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly. If th’ assassination Could trammel up the consequence and catch With his [Duncan’s] surcease success, that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here.
The difference between Trump and Macbeth, as I’ve noted in the past, is that Macbeth has a conscience and is far more reflective. Even though he is a monster, he’s far more interesting than Trump. Unlike the president, he actually worries that he is unleashing unstoppable violence upon the world, and that this violence will one day rebound against him:
But in these cases We still have judgment here, that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ ingredience of our poisoned chalice To our own lips.
In other words, with this action he is teaching others to use the same tactics, which he foresees will “return to plague th’ inventor.” He himself will ultimately drink the poison he is administering to others.
And so it happens in Shakespeare’s tragedy as Birnam Hill does in fact rise up and advance upon Dunsinane. Dare we hope that this will occur here as well, with those who still believe in the American Constitution serving as our avenging Macduff and Malcolm? Even with a happy ending, however, a lot of good people died first, including Duncan, Duncan’s servants, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and son.
One consoling thought is that the same paranoia that prompts Macbeth to turn against a former ally (Banquo) might be at work in our own situation. Musk might want to watch his back—or Trump his. But I don’t imagine that either man has enough of a conscience to see the other’s ghost rising up to chastise him. Nor, if Melania were to die, do I imagine Trump mourning her death as Macbeth mourns his spouse.
While I once derided Trump as a wannabe Macbeth, he’s a lot closer to pulling off a Macbeth coup than I ever thought possible. It appears that I suffered from Duncan complacency.
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Tuesday
Jay Kuo, who runs the Substack blog The Status Kuo, recently addressed the issue that is on many of our minds: Is Somebody Doing Something? He is referring, of course, to the Musk-Trump on-going coup. I subscribe to Kuo’s blog because he has a clear perspective of what it possible and what is not when things go haywire. Today he contends that more is being done than we may think.
And while I know it’s a small thing, the situation has me thinking of W.H. Auden’s poem “The Unknown Citizen.” Although the poem is a satire, citizens with the characteristics that Auden appears to denigrate are stepping up to resist the takeover. Such people do indeed deserve a monument, although it is not one that a surveillance state such as the one in the poem would ever erect.
Kuo says that mass purges of FBI prosecutors and agents, the shutdown of USAID, and the “tech bro putsch” at Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management—the latter giving “an unelected billionaire access and possible control over our entire federal workforce HR and some $6 trillion paid annually by our federal payment system—was deliberately carried out on Friday so that we would have the weekend to “panic for several days and make us feel like we were rudderless and without clear options.”
On the first business day following the attacks, however, Kuo says that he “can report confidently that the anti-Trump/Musk response is well underway.” Some of those responders are unknown citizens.
But let me first share the poem before mentioning names:
The Unknown Citizen By W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint, For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) And our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured. Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation. And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
As described by Auden, Unknown Citizen (who like the Unknown Soldier has no name) appears to live his life in conformity with social expectations. He has the right kind of job, the right kind of political views, the right number of children.
But note that he steps up to do his duty, which is no small thing. And it is people stepping up to do their duty—and getting fired for it—that we are seeing at the moment. Kuo notes that, currently, the front-line defenders of our democracy are
the civil servants whose roles and responsibilities are being upended or whose jobs are on the chopping block under the new administration. How they respond matters a great deal for a number of reasons, both moral and practical.
Morally speaking, it takes courage to stand up to authoritarianism, and Kuo notes that “[o]ne person’s courage is sometimes all it takes for many to find their own.” Practically, meanwhile, “stopping an illegal move initially buys valuable time for the press to be alerted, for union leaders and politicians to organize and respond, and for lawyers to be called in.”
Among the heroic personal responses over the past three days that Kuo mentions are:
–James Dennehy at the FBI, who counseled his staff to “dig in” and who wrote, “Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy.”
–David Lebryk at Treasury, who refused to grant Musk’s team access to the Fiscal Service, which disburses over $5.4 trillion. Then he retired, depriving the team of his knowledge of how to read, sort and control payments. As Kuo puts it, “More sand in the gears.”
–Director and Dep. Director for Security, John Vorhees, and Brian McGill at USAID, who denied Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (not an actual department) access to classified materials. Both were suspended.
Of course, unknown citizens can swing both ways, and there are those faceless figures that participate in Nazi rallies and refuse to acknowledge the neighboring concentration camp. But Auden’s unknown citizen appears to have taken civics in high school, which is looking very attractive these days. The man even belonged to a union, which would not make Musk or Trump happy.
Of more concern in Auden’s poem is the “we.” Trump’s billionaire allies—not only Musk—are vacuuming up personal information in ways that the poet could never have imagined. Trump is determined to make it even easier for them.
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Monday
In February 2022 I shared “We Lived Happily During the War,” by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, because it was important that Americans oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Little did I think that America would be experiencing its own invasion two years later. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascist takeovers, points out,
We are living through a new kind of coup in which Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has taken over the payment and other administration systems that allow the American government to function, and has locked out federal employees from computer systems. Many of Musk’s collaborators in this endeavor previously worked for his private companies and/or helped him take over Twitter.
For Ben-Ghiat, there is a frightening sense of familiarity to this:
What is happening now builds on classic authoritarian dynamics as I described them in Strongmen and in many essays for Lucid. There is always an “inner sanctum” that really runs the show, with its mix of family members and cronies, some with histories of working with or for foreign powers. And there is almost always a purge of the federal bureaucracy. That is now being carried out on a mass scale.
Ben-Ghiat notes that the goal is to “rearrange government around an extremist ideological project of Christian nationalism and White supremacy.” A second goal is to “enact neoliberal deregulation and privatization meaures.” Progress on both fronts has been horrifyingly rapid:
The speed of its implementation makes Trump’s takeover stand out within an authoritarian framework. The more corrupt and criminal the autocrat, the more he is obsessed with punishing enemies and feeling safe. Cue the immediate execution of the revenge and retribution part of this plan, with anyone who was involved in attempts to bring Trump and his collaborators to justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection or anything else, FBI employees included, is now a target.
Only with coups, Ben-Ghiat concludes, does one see “such a rush to punish and expel non-loyalists from the government.”
With that in mind, Kaminsky’s poem is a call for us to wake up, even if we ourselves are not yet suffering:
We Lived Happily During the War By Ilya Kaminsky
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
What does enough protesting and enough opposing look like? Kaminsky doesn’t say and I myself don’t have clear answers. But just because we aren’t seeing obvious signs of people pushing back doesn’t mean that they aren’t. In her Washington Post column an aging Anne Lamott, who believes that resistance can’t be rushed, points out some of the quiet forms protest is taking:
It is in the witness and courage of the Right Rev. Mariann Budde. It is in the bags of groceries we keep taking to food pantries. It looks like generosity, like compassion. It looks like the profound caring for victims of the fires, and providing refuge for immigrants and resisting the idea that they are dangerous or unwanted, and reaching out to queer nieces, siblings and strangers and helping resist the notion that their identities are unworthy, let alone illegal.
And:
It is in our volunteer support for public schools and libraries, because we know the new president holds them in contempt and fear. Teachers and librarians are allies for souls who have been dismissed as hopeless.
Throughout history, it has always been the case that we can’t do more than what is doable. None of us can stop the coup on our own. But what we can do, we should do.
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Sunday
Today’s Gospel lesson features two “righteous and devout” individuals, Simeon and Anna, who have grown old while patiently awaiting the coming of the messiah. Their faith is finally rewarded when they encounter Jesus as a child.
Biblical scholar and theologian Richard Bauckman has a poem in which he describes the waiting process as travelers stranded in a train station. “The hardest part of waiting is the not doing,” he observes before warning, “waiting too long the heart grows sclerotic.”
Whatever the state of his heart, Simeon is overjoyed (so Luke informs us) when he encounters Jesus, declaring,
Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.
Anna, meanwhile, “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.” Bauckman characterizes their prayers as “waiting with desire,” concluding, “eyes will see what hearts await.”
Wait and See (Simeon and Anna) By Richard Bauckman
In the drab waiting-room the failed travelers, resigned, sleep on the hard benches, inured to postponement and foul coffee. Hope has given up on them.
There are also the impatient, pacing platforms, and the driven, purple with frustration, abusing their mobiles, for the hardest part of waiting is the not doing.
Truly to wait is pure dependence. But waiting too long the heart grows sclerotic. Will it still be fit to leap when the time comes? Prayer is waiting with desire.
Two aged lives incarnate century on century of waiting for God, their waiting-room his temple, waiting on his presence, marking time by practicing
the cycle of the sacrifices, ferial and festival, circling onward, spiraling towards a center out ahead, seasons of revolving hope.
Holding out for God who cannot be given up for dead, holding him to his promises – not now, not just yet, but soon, surely, eyes will see what hearts await.
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Friday
Black History Month, which begins tomorrow, takes on a special significance this year given rightwing America’s attempts to erase Black history from our national consciousness. First there was the Air Force removing video materials about the Tuskegee airmen (as well as about women service pilots), although they’ve since been put back in the curriculum following a hew and cry. Now we get word that the Defense Department’s intelligence agency has paused observances of Black History Month, as well as observance of Pride Month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, and other cultural and historical annual events.
None of this should come as a surprise. For years we’ve seen MAGA go after such works as Ruby Bridges Goes to School and Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” And then there’s the wholesale assault on Toni Morrison that has been underway for decades.
The erasure of history is an ongoing theme of George Orwell’s 1984, which increasingly appears to be describing our reality. The Party’s slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” appears to have been unofficially adopted by Trump. What he wants is an eternal now in which he defines reality. Or as Winston explains it to Julia, “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
I’m struck by the contrast between Orwell’s pessimism about totalitarian regimes reshaping history and poet Lucille Clifton’s optimism that history wields a power unto itself. In “i am accused of tending to the past,” written around 1990, she sees Black history growing up as it remembers faces, names, and dates. “When she is strong enough to travel on her own,” Clifton writes, “beware, she will”:
i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it, as if i sculpted it with my own hands. i did not. this past was waiting for me when i came, a monstrous unnamed baby, and i with my mother’s itch took it to breast and named it History. she is more human now, learning languages everyday, remembering faces, names and dates. when she is strong enough to travel on her own, beware, she will.
I wonder if Clifton regarded Black History Month as being a necessary mother, required to nurture a History not yet strong enough to stand on its own, much less travel. In any event, MAGA appears to heeding Clifton’s threat—“beware, she will”—and is taking every measure to ensure it never grows up. The attacks on DEI have essentially become Jim Crow 2024, an attempt to reinstate our racial caste system following a half century of significant progress. An historical knowledge of what African Americans have endured and how they have resisted and sometimes triumphed is therefore essential.
It is therefore encouraging to learn about instances of Black history being taught in weekend programs—such as this one in Florida—to counteract MAGA assaults on school history curricula. Literature, meanwhile, has its own vital role to play, one that is particularly important given the ability of stories and poems to capture the complexities of race in America. As authors like Clifton, Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and all those others make clear, the experience of being Black and White in America is so multidimensional that no single perspective can do it justice. While the Trump administration would certainly like to end an awareness of our tortured history of race, to a certain extent Clifton is right: it’s currently traveling on its own more than it ever has, despite attacks. As one who learned Tennessee history from a segregationist teacher in 1963—Fred Langford barely mentioned slavery—I can see the difference.
Every year on the Sunday nearest Martin Luther King’s birthday, Episcopal churches (and other denominations as well, I suspect) sing James Weldon Johnson’s inspiring “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” You can read the whole song here but for today’s purpose I excerpt the lines referring to Black history:
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
When confronting renewed attempts at oppression, nothing is more powerful than knowing that one has triumphed over oppression in the past. Only when one succumbs to the timeless present that authoritarians desire does one lose hope and give up.
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Thursday
A recent essay drawing on the ideas of linguist and philosopher George Lakoff contends that, once we understand why Donald Trump’s supporters keep calling him “Daddy”–and why they continue to infantilize themselves on national television–we will “hold the key to understanding the psychology of the Republican Party and the cult of Trump.” Reading Gil Duran’s article conjured up for me William Blake’s Nobodaddy.
The examples Duran cites are disturbing and sometimes downright creepy, at least to those not in the Trumpian cult. For instance:
“It’s like daddy arrived, and he’s taking his belt off, you know?” said actor Mel Gibson during a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox.
“Daddy’s back!” exclaimed Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida after Trump’s inauguration. “Daddy’s home!” tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. “Dad is home,” declared conservative troll Charlie Kirk. “Straighten up sucker, cuz daddy’s home!” sang Kid Rock at Trump’s inauguration party. “Now your daddy’s home,” jeered Roseanne Barr and Tom MacDonald in a bizarre Trump-themed rap song.
Creepiest of all is Tucker Carlson comparing America to a naughty daughter whom Trump needs to spank:
You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. … It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.
Duran is drawing on Lakoff’s concept of “strict father morality,” which the philosopher describes it as follows:
The strict father model begins with a set of assumptions: The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong.
Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good. What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can: • Protect the family in the dangerous world, • Support the family in the difficult world, and • Teach his children right from wrong.
What is required of the child is obedience, because the strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong. It is further assumed that the only way to teach kids obedience—that is, right from wrong—is through punishment, painful punishment, when they do wrong.
The punishment aimed at kids is also aimed at others, such as immigrants, poor families, and struggling women. It also informs a certain view of Christianity.
Currently we are seeing two strains of Christianity wrestling for the soul of America, the love-oriented Christianity that Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde preached the other day and the punishment-oriented Christianity of Trump supporters. It was this latter version of God that Blake attacks in his poetry.
I admit to not understanding much of Blake’s bewildering cosmology, but I instinctively get his aversion to an angry daddy god. Nobodaddy is perhaps a compound word taken from “Old Daddy Nobody.” Some have also suggested that Blake means it to be a close anagram of Abaddon, the “angel of the bottomless pit” who appears in Revelation 9:11 and is mentioned in Job 26:6. According to Blake scholar L. Edwin Folsom, the poet sees this god as a farting and belching “Father of Jealousy” who hides himself in clouds and loves “hanging & drawing & quartering / Every bit as well as war & slaughtering.” At different points in his poetry Blake associates him with Winter, the Will, and the Old Testament God.
If there’s a connection with Revelation’s Abaddon, then he would also be associated with the king of locusts, which supposedly will be released during the apocalypse in order to torture “those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.” In the eyes of some Trump Christians, this includes anyone who votes Democratic.
Here one of Blake’s poems featuring the dark fathernfigure:
To Nobodaddy
Why art thou silent & invisible Father of jealousy Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds From every searching Eye
Why darkness & obscurity In all thy words & laws That none dare eat the fruit but from The wily serpents jaws Or is it because Secrecy gains females loud applause
When one lives in thrall to such a daddy god, one sees sexuality as a secret and sinful temptation (“wily serpents jaws”)—which helps explain why we regularly hear about MAGA pastors molesting children or committing adultery. Whereas if one sees God as a figure of love, then the world looks very different, as in this poem from Songs of Innocence:
The Shepherd
How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot! From the morn to the evening he strays; He shall follow his sheep all the day, And his tongue shall be fillèd with praise.
For he hears the lambs’ innocent call, And he hears the ewes’ tender reply; He is watchful while they are in peace, For they know when their shepherd is nigh.
This is closer to how I raised my own children–listening to their calls, taking them seriously, and replying tenderly–and they have grown into responsible and kind men as well as extraordinary fathers. No belt was needed.
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Wednesday
As Donald Trump slings around his wrecking ball, targeting such worthy programs as Meals on Wheels, Head Start, school lunches, child-care help, student loans, disaster relief, crime-fighting assistance and Medicaid itself (which provides healthcare to 82 million Americans), we await to see whether anything can pierce the bubble around him. Greg Olear of the Substack blog Prevail asks, “Why do so many Americans still walk around in a fog, oblivious to the swirl of change around them, ignorant of the ill intent of the oligarchs, in denial about the malefic character of our once and current President?”
If Trump’s monumental bungling of a plague failed to wake people up, he wonders, will anything? Are Trump supporters “capable of admitting they’d been had?”
I wrote on this subject this past Monday, citing a passage from George Eliot’s Silas Marner about living in denial. Olear suggests another passage that applies, this one from W.H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety.
Before giving it to you, however, let me first quote from the poem that serves as its preamble. In “September 1, 1939,” written about the start of World War II, Auden writes,
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.
The Trump era can certainly be called low and dishonest, with Biden’s four-year interlude ultimately unable to overcome Trumpism’s incessant lying and fearmongering. In Age of Anxiety, written eight years later and reflecting on how fascism got so far, Auden writes,
We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.
We would rather remain in our illusions—stay stuck in our s**t, as the saying goes—than face up to the truth of our condition. Our dread may make us miserable but it’s familiar. Jesus understood this state of mind and climbed “the cross of the moment” to awaken us. Stepping away from our ruin and embracing real change requires a courage that appears beyond many of us.
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Tuesday
“F**k it: Release ’em all,” Donald Trump reportedly said about the insurrectionists who, at his instigation, stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, battling with police in a conflict that led to many injuries and several deaths. He has, to borrow from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, cried “havoc” and let slip the dogs of war.
America’s militant right was, needless to say, jubilant at Trump’s decision. Proud Boys’ leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy, declared, “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat, they need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted.” Oath Keepers leader Stuart Rhodes, sentenced to 18 years for the same, said the prosecutors should be tried for their “crimes.” And the so-called QAnon shaman crowed, “”I got a pardon baby! Thank you President Trump! Now I am gonna buy some motha f***in guns!”
The judge who sentenced Rhodes in 2023 said at the time, “You are smart, you are charismatic and compelling and frankly that’s what makes you dangerous. The moment you are released, whenever that may be, you will be ready to take up arms against your government.” In other words, Trump is well on his way to inspiring a paramilitary to supplement his other powers.
Antony delivers his famous line immediately after Julius Caesar has been assassinated. Seething with feelings of revenge and resentment, he vows that “domestic fury and fierce civil strife shall cumber all the parts of Italy” and that all pity will be “choked with custom of fell deeds.” Caesar’s spirit, he promises, will come “ranging for revenge” from hot hell and will be accompanied by Átē, the Greek god of moral blindness and ruin:
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy (Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue) A curse shall light upon the limbs of men; Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use And dreadful objects so familiar That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war, All pity choked with custom of fell deeds; And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men groaning for burial.
Trump is no less unhinged than Antony in his desire for retribution against those who tried to hold him accountable. His pardons are one way of expressing this.
And as for the results, we can say—shifting to another Shakespeare play—”Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
