Trump’s Debate and Swift’s City Shower

By Robin Bates | Published: June 30, 2024


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Monday

Here’s hoping that Democrats have had a chance to recover from their panic over Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance against Donald Trump. I recall seeing similar panic following Bill Clinton’s first debate against George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama’s first debate against Mitt Romney and they did just fine in November. In other words, debates don’t determine who wins, and Biden already is showing some ability to bounce back.

I’m also persuaded by comments from people who have a deep understanding of what is involved in a presidential race, figures like Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Bouzy, Allan Lichtman, and Simon Rosenberg. All point to the futility of longing for a candidate on a white horse riding in to save the day. Bouzy, one of our most accurate prognosticators, says replacing Biden at this stage would lead to a red wave for sure in November.

Others say that the only replacement plan that would have any chance of working is Biden making a full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris, who is the only figure who would inherit his funds (since the money raised is for the two of them). O’Donnell warns that a late replacement could be a rerun of Humphrey vs. Nixon, Humphrey having been a convention-time replacement who later said he lacked the time needed to catch up (he almost did).

The Aesop story of the mice deciding that the cat should be belled also comes to mind. None of the editorials and columns I’ve seen saying that Biden should step down suggest who should replace him and all the obstacles that person would face.

In his play Galileo, Bertolt Brecht has his protagonist lament, “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.” If the only way to defeat a pathological liar and convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government is by fielding someone with the charisma of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama—well, then we are indeed uphappy as there are only so many people with those credentials. Biden’s doing a good job of running the government—maybe the best I’ve seen since Lyndon Johnson (if you ignore Vietnam)—and he has built a good organization. Brecht says we need collective action, not heroes, to prevail, and the Democrats have plenty of people willing to work hard to defeat Trump. Perhaps they should stop looking for a hero.

Returning to the debate, the best explanations I’ve heard about what happened Thursday night come from historian Heather Cox Richardson and authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Richardson says that Trump used a rhetorical technique known as “the Gish gallop,” which involves throwing out

 a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

Ben-Ghiat, meanwhile, says that Biden faced a “firehose of falsehoods” comprised of

 a stream of lies, half-truths, and insinuations, all delivered at high volume (thus the firehose). It’s a Kremlin tactic but practiced by authoritarians around the world. Trump’s one of world’s most skilled practitioners of this dark art, as is the Murdoch family, who deliver a tsunami of lies and smears daily.

At the end of today’s post I provide Richardson’s summation of Trump’s tsunami of lies but you probably know what they are already.

The ultimate aim of such a tsunami, Ben-Ghiat says, is

 to destroy the idea that we can know the truth, creating situations of dependence on leaders’ fake versions of reality, and ultimately encouraging nihilism —if you distrust everything, you believe in nothing. Then you are far less likely to engage in resistance to uphold ideals like justice and freedom.

Political scientist John Stoehr looks at the psychological effectiveness of the tactic:

[A]s someone who recognizes in the president a variety of neurodivergence – he stutters; I have ADHD – I also saw in him what happens when lies come at you like a torrent. It’s paralyzing. I mean that literally. You don’t know what to do. And while your brain is firing in all directions simultaneously, you look like someone, as my friend Hussein Ibish said, who “couldn’t keep his train of thought together most of the time and had difficulty forming coherent sentences.”

This talk about firehoses and Gish gallops brings to mind Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower.” In that poem, a shower starts off quietly but assumes apocalyptic dimensions by the end. Early on, Swift compares the looming clouds to a drunkard about to vomit up everything within, which certainly describes Trump’s verbal torrent:

         Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings,
A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings,
That swilled more liquor than it could contain,
And, like a drunkard, gives it up again.

Once the storm really gets going, Swift gets to describe the filthiness of London. In the last line, the chaos has become so overwhelming that the rhyming iambic couplets break down and we are given a line that is virtually impossible to scan:

         Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.
They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,
And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge,
Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.

 Swift is not only writing about London in this poem but the way that modern urban life is disrupting the quieter and more genteel traditions of the landed gentry. In other words, this is an early attack on the modern world, one that England will see repeated in the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, and others. In Trump’s case, he has found ways to disrupt the orderly process of debate, just as he has disrupted so many of our society’s institutions. Last Thursday we saw his dead cats and turnip tops come tumbling down the flood.

Yet all we seem to be talking about is whether Joe Biden is up to the job of being president.

Trump’s swelling kennels:

Trump’s string of lies were so overwhelming, Richardson notes, that it took CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, quickly speaking, to get through the list. She continues,

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt. 

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie.

Perhaps Biden should have been better prepared for Trump’s Gish gallop, so I suppose one could blame him or his team for that. Apparently, in his debate prep he was drilled on policy positions, but policy becomes irrelevant when you’re debating a non-stop liar. The real judgement of his competency, however, should be how well he’s doing as president. And what a catastrophe Trump was.

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Excess and Deficiency in the Life Force

By Robin Bates | Published: June 29, 2024
Healing of a Bleeding Woman, Peter-Marcellinus catacomb, 4th century A.D.

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Sunday

For help in understanding today’s Gospel reading, which involves two healing stories, I turn to Lory Hess’s recently released book When Fragments Make a Whole, which she and I have written about here Lory’s project involves looking at each of the instances where Jesus heals, interpreting the incident, reflecting on it poetically, and applying it to a time in her own life when she was struggling. Her reflections are wise, heartfelt, and healing in their own right. It’s Lectio Divina at its best.

Lory sees connections between the story of the woman suffering twelve years of perpetual hemorrhages and the death of a synagogue leader’s daughter. In her view, they represent respectively a menstrual disorder and “a girl of 12 on the threshold of puberty having difficulty crossing over into womanhood.” Lory says that the two female figures represent “an excess and a deficiency in the powerful life force that flows through the organs of reproduction and guides women through the changes of their cycle.” To achieve balance, they need Jesus’s mediating presence.

Here the Gospel passage in its entirety:

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” So he went with him.

And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat. (Mark 5:21-43)

Lory imagines a backstory for both women. The hemorrhaging woman, she speculates, was raped when a teen, thought she would be able to hide that fact when she miscarried, but then found herself beset with ongoing bleeding. The little girl, by contrast, Lory imagines lacking the strength and the courage to transition into womanhood so that every day, little by little, she wastes away before finally dying.

As Lory sees it, integral to the woman’s healing is her willingness to reveal the whole truth about herself. When Jesus tells her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” Lory says this faith is a trust in divine love and goodness. “Healing can only take effect,” she writes,

when we let go of the fear that holds us imprisoned and open up to the good that guides our destiny, no matter how painful and incomprehensible it may appear at the moment. If we can persist patiently in spite of years of failure and suffering, and dare to reach out when we sense a healing power approaching, a sudden resurgence of energy is possible.

And then she adds,

Miracles are not events that overturn the laws of nature, but simply what happens when long-disjointed channels come back into alignment so that life can flow through them again.

As for the little girl who has died out of puberty fears, Lory says that that fear “must be replaced by trusting faith in the loving purposes of God.” When Jesus says, “Little girl, get up!” the girl finds the strength within herself to grow into her potential.

And now to the poems. The first captures the woman’s dilemma:

I could never be clean,
and no one could touch me
without soiling themselves–
no, not even the hem of my garment.
So my dark life flowed out,
abundant but useless,
love consumed by death.

Then she sees Jesus, out of whom also pours an endless source of life, although this is an affirmation, not a denial, of life:

Then I saw where he walked,
a bright star mobbed by clouds,
and a ray of hope pierced my darkness.
He, too, poured out life
from an endless source,
but no death reigned in him.

Sensing an opportunity, the woman thinks,

If I could just touch his shining,
come in range of that radiance,
my light might be rekindled,
my empty heart cease its weeping.

She therefore approaches, stealthily, and touches the hem of God:

I’ll not halt his healing of the maiden,
nor show myself or speak,
just come close in the crowd
and reach out my hand,
nearer, nearer,
now…

The girl also has a secret shame, although it’s a biological process that all girls experience. Lory imagines that her dying begins at the puberty rituals that mark childhood’s end:

That’s when I started to die a little,
as if some essence left my limbs
along with the bloody flow.
I couldn’t speak of it, too ashamed
to say I might not have the strength
for shouldering a woman’s lot
of suffering and care.
But day by day my life bled out,
and I walked in a dream unaware how I went,
until I staggered and fell.

As the girl sees it, there’s no turning back:

How could I return
to that life I’d failed?
Wouldn’t it happen again?
The bleeding, the losing,
the fainting, the dying?
Better to just float away.

When Jesus reaches out his hand, however, all this begins to change. Lory sees the moment as an acceptance of womanhood and possible motherhood:

Then his hand in mind,
and I felt flowing through it
a woman’s courage, that no man can know:
courage to bear impossible life,
to strive against hope, and face down death
for the sake of a future unborn.

The final stanza may echo George Herbert famous “Love (III)” in which the poet reports, “Love bade me welcome” and proceeds to override all the poet’s self-doubts. Lory has the girl declare,

Love asked me to live,
and at last I could answer
Yes.

So there you have it: mediating excess and deficiency by means of the way, the truth, and the life.

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Using Poetry to Mourn a Child

By Robin Bates | Published: June 27, 2024
Maxim Vorobiev, Oak Fractured by Lightning (1842)

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Friday

I’ve been reading Indigo: The Color of Grief, Jonathan Foster’s recently released book of poems about the death of his 20-year-old daughter, which is salve for anyone who has lost a child—or for that matter, anyone who has lost someone close. In my case, we lost our 21-year-old son Justin, and although it happened almost a quarter of a century ago, the underlying ache is always there. Foster provides lyrics that are so poignant, so true to my own experience, that they take my breath away.

For instance, he somehow manages to capture the evanescence of one who was intensively present at one moment and then gone the next. The book opens with a memory of father and daughter being caught in a thunderstorm while hiking in the Rockies, which leads to the following image:

my daughter was a
twenty-year lightning strike
brilliant detonation
across the backdrop of
all we were

she flashed
in what now
seems like an
instant

though i think i
still see the outline
of her power
etched into the air
lingering

electricity
of the past
throbbing beauty
of the present

Many of the poems in the collection revisit memories, both of what his daughter brought to the world and of how she shaped him as a father. It brings to mind my own memories, which sometimes I carry as luminescent gems. The departed one is both “a no-thing” and “a some-thing”:

it’s weird
absence is nothing
a no-thing
but it’s very much something
a some-thing

it has no form but
it forms me
it has no energy but
it energizes me
i’m full of its emptiness

One reason why you should never tell those grieving that they will get over it is that (1) one never does, even though the grief becomes less acute and (2) because grief is a way of keeping the dead present. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis talks about the pain of the second death, which is the death of the grieving. In the week before the first-year anniversary of Justin’s death I remember feeling terrified of losing Justin this second time. But I need not have worried. The dead always remain, as Foster assures us they will.

Foster opens and closes his book, prologue and epilogue, with the thunderstorm episode, and I wonder if he is alluding to the concluding section of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. In “What the Thunder Said,” Eliot speaks of his desolation as he wanders through a waterless landscape. Yet, in the end, there is the promise of rain and of healing grace, and the poem’s last line is “Shanti, shanti, shanti,” which means “peace, peace, peace.” Eliot compares this to the Biblical “peace that passeth all understanding.”

Foster too seems to find a kind of peace in how the electrical presence of his daughter still “lingers in the air”:

throbs of beauty
the past electricity

lingers
in the air
power etched
in an outline
flash
across the backdrop
of all we see
the detonation is brilliant
lightning bolt

beauty terrible beauty
air charged with a buzz
pine trees in sway
atmosphere smell
i remember

The two are pelted with rain and surrounded by thunderous explosions:

on top of us
behind us
before us
shale and rock

And yet, because of the lightning flashes, the mountain seems to rise up toward the “brooding skies”:

the mountainside
scrambling up toward
brooding skies

                           thunder

I sense a kind of uplift in that final image, despite the cosmic chaos. We have been blessed with “beauty terrible beauty,” which death cannot take that away. As Foster, echoing Paul in Corinthians 2, writes immediately before the epilogue,

and
now these two questions remain
              why do bad things happen?
              and why do good things happen?
but the greatest of these is
               why do good things happen?

There may be one other Eliot tie-in. In his final lines, Eliot talks of using these fragments—fragments of different poems and different languages—to shore up against “my ruins.” Foster talks of doing the same in an introductory poem that explains how the poems were composed:

i have written this story
the way i received it
the way it’s been bouncing
around inside
              conversational tone
              short sentences
              hints
              suspicions
              little punctuation
              no capitalization

 That seems a powerful way to deal with loss. Death defies all of our meaning-making attempts—no use of language can fully do justice to the tragedy—but we make do with the fragments that we have. It helps explain why Indigo comes as close as anything I have read in a while at capturing what it’s like to lose a child.

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The Debate: How Will Trump Fare?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 26, 2024
Gustave Doré, Satan addresses the fallen angels in Paradise Lost

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Thursday

After having watched Trump’s debate performances in the past, I’m wondering how he will manage without a live audience and with his mic cut off when it’s Biden’s turn to speak. So much of his energy comes from feeding off his fans and from interrupting his opponents that he might find it hard to perform. I think of what Charlie says about Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman:

Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a Shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake.

I grant that the parallels quickly break down. While Loman is a flawed character, he is not the conman that Trump is. And he’s simply looking for smiles, not worshipful adulation. Nor is he calling for retribution against people he doesn’t like.

But that being acknowledged, there’s some merit to pushing the comparison, starting with the fact that Trump too is a salesman. Nothing more and nothing less. He too has no rock bottom to his life since, despite his claims, he doesn’t build anything. He just slaps his name on things, being no more than a brand. If people ever stopped buying his schtick, he would be finished.

Unfortunately they keep on buying it, allowing him to escape Willie Loman’s earthquake. He’s one salesman who hasn’t died but who is still going strong, even at 78.

Perhaps a better parallel is with Milton’s Satan, with whom I’ve compared Trump in the past (for instance, here). Satan is the quintessential narcissist and in his last appearance in Paradise Lost, he is thrown when he gets a different audience response than the one he is expecting.

Here’s the situation: Satan has promised the fallen angels that, in revenge for their defeat at God’s hands, he will corrupt God’s special creation. This he succeeds in doing, and he returns to Hell to receive the applause of his troops.

In doing so, he demonstrates that he has Trump’s flair for the theatrical. Just as Trump descended his golden escalator when he first announced he would be running for president, so Satan has his own surprise: he sneaks unnoticed onto his throne and then allows his light to shine forth:

                                                 All amazed
At that so sudden blaze the Stygian throng
Bent their aspect, and whom they wished beheld,
Their mighty Chief returned: loud was th’ acclaim: 
Forth rushed in haste the great consulting Peer…

At this point, Satan imperiously raises his hand for silence and delivers a self-congratulatory speech. Having returned “successful beyond hope,” he tells the angels, he will now “lead ye forth triumphant out of this infernal pit.” He also mocks God as he recounts how he has seduced Adam and Eve with an apple. God is “worth your laughter,” Satan concludes, and then goes silent in order to bask in the anticipated congratulations.

He gets a very different response, however:

So having said, a while he stood, expecting
Their universal shout and high applause 
To fill his ear, when contrary he hears
On all sides, from innumerable tongues
A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn…

It so happens that God has turned everyone into a snake, which explains the hisses. Now, Trump won’t be receiving hisses for his own performance tonight—there will be no audience to give him any kind of response—but for a man who lives to be applauded, the silence could well throw him off balance. I think it’s even possible that he stalks out of the room midway through the debate.

Not being much of a political prognosticator, I shouldn’t be making predictions. Let’s just say that the former president will not be in his comfort zone, and when he’s uncomfortable, anything is possible.  

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The Meaning of Trump’s Shark Fears

By Robin Bates | Published: June 25, 2024

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Wednesday

Last week, when I was using the figure of Mack the Knife in Three Penny Opera to explain why Donald Trump’s fans are drawn to him, I initially missed the shark connection—which is to say, Mackie is compared to a shark while Donald Trump is obsessed with the fish. Recently, the former president went on a weird riff about how, if he had to make a choice between death by electronic boat battery or death by shark, he would choose the former.

Trump has a visceral hatred of sharks, as we learned when Stormy Daniels revealed how they watched Shark Week during their non-dinner date. Trump’s obsession gives me the opportunity to reflect back on the significance of the best-selling novel and blockbuster film Jaws, which gripped the country in 1974-75.

Daniels writes that Trump is “terrified of sharks. He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’” This obsession with sharks prompted a recent suggestion by Andy Borowitz that Joe Biden come to tomorrow’s debate dressed in a shark costume:

“There is nothing in the debate rules that prohibits a participant from dressing as a giant man-eating fish,” a Biden spokesman said.

As if to taunt his adversary, Biden appeared in a video today dressed as the carnivorous sea creature, telling Trump, “Shark Week came early, pal.”

In case you missed it, here’s Trump’s riff. I run it in its entirety (you’re free to skip over it) because it’s been prompting people to query whether Trump is losing it. Washington Post columnist Gene Robinson, for instance, observed in his understated way,

In 2016, Trump said outrageous things at his campaign rallies to be entertaining. In 2024, his tangents raise serious questions about his mental fitness.

So here’s the shark tangent, which started off (I think) as an attack on electronic vehicles and moved on to electronic boats:

I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’

By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that? Lot of sharks. I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said, ‘There’s no problem with sharks, they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming.’ No, really got decimated, and other people, too, a lot of shark attacks.

So I said, ‘There’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards, or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer.

He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks.

While Trump’s tangent is whacky, his fear of sharks has a classic psychological explanation, brought to you courtesy of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud says that whatever we fear, we repress and what we repress becomes toxic and returns to us in the form of nightmares and neurosis. “Secrets make us sick” covers the first point and “the return of the repressed” the second.

So what is Trump’s fear? Of being vulnerable and therefore (in his eyes) not a real man. (Many authoritarians have this fear.) Strong women especially are seen as emasculating threats, and one of the forms this fear takes is of the vagina dentata or toothed vagina, which swallows up one’s manhood. Sharks fit this archetype particularly well although Jung talks about how the fear can take the form of other predatory animals as well.

One of the most famous literary toothed vaginas is Scylla in The Odyssey. This six-headed female monster lurks in a cave and springs out as mariners pass, grabbing sailors. Scylla is paired with the giant whirlpool Charybdis, another devouring vagina. As a warrior epic, it makes sense that Homer’s poem would present Odysseus with a number of female threats to his manhood. (There’s also Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, and the cannibalistic giantess who rules over the Laestrygonians.)

Jung’s word for the phenomena is anima, man’s female side. If men accept this side of themselves, they will achieve balance and the monsters will lose their toxic power. But if they don’t—and Trump certainly hasn’t—these animals will haunt their dreams (and not only their dreams, as we are seeing with Trump). Men in the grip of toxic masculinity believe they can prove themselves by asserting their dominance over women—grab them by their pussies—but that just makes the problem worse.

One can attribute the immense popularity of Jaws to male anxieties of the era. At the time, second wave feminism was at its height while, at the same time, America’s period of the Great Prosperity was coming to an end. Men were losing their jobs or finding it more difficult to raise their families. And then the country lost its first war.

In short, men who defined themselves by their manliness felt themselves dangerously exposed.

There were a lot of movies in the early seventies of masculinity under threat, from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies to Charles Bronson’s Walking Tall. But Jaws held special prominence. As men read the book and watched the film, they (1) saw their anxieties articulated and (2) could indulge in a revenge fantasy wish fulfillment. The man with the bigger boat defeats the toothed monster from the id.

The satisfaction was short-lived, however, because Benchley’s story doesn’t address the underlying anxieties in a substantive way. The problem with pop culture is that, while offering temporary sugar highs, it doesn’t last long.

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Trump’s VP? Lady Bracknell Knows

By Robin Bates | Published: June 24, 2024
Dench as Lady Bracknell in Importance of Being Earnest

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Tuesday

I’m in full proofreading mode for my book (Better Living through Literature) so today’s essay will be short. I was recently struck by a Thom Hartmann substack article on the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Plan and how the billionaires backing it don’t care much for Donald Trump. They just see him as the means to make it happen.

A passage from the piece brought to mind a line from The Importance of Being Earnest. More on that in a moment.

If you don’t know about the plan, it’s essential that you should because it’s a systematic blueprint for ending American democracy, converting it into (in Hartmann’s words) “something like the old Confederacy.” Among its goals are ending public education, criminalizing most forms of birth control, firing thousands of federal civil servants, deporting 10 million+ undocumented immigrants, rolling back LGBTQ+ protections, slashing Medicaid, and on and on.

Step #1, of course, is reelecting Trump and, ideally, a GOP Congress. Hartmann’s column gets interesting when he moves on to step #2, however. To enact the Heritage plan, these billionaires need the right vice-president.

We talk of the V-P choice being Trump’s to make, but Hartmann makes a convincing case that the oligarchs will be doing the deciding. As Hartman observes,

To accomplish a major task like this is going to require a person who’s smart, well-educated, disciplined, wealthy, and utterly without scruples or a moral compass. In other words, JD Vance (or somebody very much like him: Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Elise Stefanik).

In his show The Apprentice, Hartmann points out, we are now learning that everything was scripted and that Trump wasn’t in fact using his (non-existent) business savvy to keep and fire people. Instead, he was provided names ahead of time. And so it will be the case here: Trump will be informed who his vice-president will be and, because he is so desperate for billionaire cash, will say yes to whomever. And here’s where Wilde comes in, with Trump as Gwendolyn and the Heritage folks as Lady Bracknell:

Gwendolyn: I am engaged to Mr. Worthing, mamma. [They rise together.]
Lady Bracknell: Pardon me, you are not engaged to anyone. When you do become engaged to someone, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.

So while we’re sure to watch several weeks of Trump teasing us as to whom he’s going to pick—like Gwendolyn, he thinks he has a choice—the script may already have been written. My money is on J.D. Vance, a favorite of billionaire Peter Thiel. Maybe Thiel will even be the one to inform Trump of the fact.

Perhaps over a plate of cucumber sandwiches.

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D.H. Lawrence’s Egotistical Jesus

By Robin Bates | Published: June 23, 2024

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Monday

Today I follow up a partially formulated thought shared in Friday’s post about how Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera helped me to understand Donald Trump’s seductive lure. In that essay I spoke about Trump going for rogue appeal, the bad boy whose swagger enchants the public. Although I myself am horrified by Trump, through recalling my attraction to Mack the Knife I may have caught a glimpse into the thrill that Trump fans experience when he goes on one of his rants.

For those of us who walk around with “thou shalt not” in our head all the time, it’s sometimes a relief to encounter a character who thumbs his or her nose at the morality police. Certainly, I heard this internal voice fairly constantly when I was a child. Above all, I carried around “thou shalt not focus on your own concerns, only those of other people.” As a result, I would feel guilty if I thought about my own desires. Much of my childhood was spent self-censoring.

This notion of self-sacrifice came down to me from both sides of the family, with three of my four grandparents born during the Victorian era and the fourth born not long after. You see the idea of self-sacrifice promulgated over and over in 19th century novels.

Noble though it is, self-sacrifice took some noxious forms when I was growing up in the 1950s. I think of the women who were expected to give up career ambitions to take care of husband and children. And of men who were expected to give up their lives to fight for the greater good, which is one thing if you are fighting fascism in Germany and Japan but quite something else if the enemy is a man who fought against colonial French rule in Vietnam.

When I got to college, I remember encountering some thinkers who encouraged me to push back against this sense of (to borrow a phrase from Garrison Keillor) perpetual responsibility. (Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility is the Catholic church in Lake Woebegone.) One was Friedrich Nietzsche, who contended that Christian morality was a passive aggressive power move by a slave religion to gain power. (“The meek shall inherit the earth” was a way of hamstringing the free-spirited and powerful, the Übermenschen.) Brecht, meanwhile, appeared to tear the mask off “middle class morality” (to quote Eliza Doolittle’s father in Pygmalion) and show what people really think and how they behave. And then there was D.H. Lawrence’s novella The Man Who Died.

In the novella, a resurrected Jesus decides to stop living for others and to start living for himself. In this decision, he disappoints Mary Magdalene, who as a former prostitute (which is not historically accurate) has gone from one extreme (excessive taking) to the opposite (excessive giving). In their conversation they talk about the two kinds of excess, starting with Jesus:

My public life is over, the life of my self-importance…I have died, and now I know my own limits. Now I can live without striving to sway others anymore. For my reach ends in my fingertips, and my stride is no longer than the ends of my toes. Yet I would embrace multitudes, I who have never truly embraced even one. But Judas and the high priests saved me from my own salvation…

“Do you want to be alone henceforward?” she asked. “And was your mission nothing? Was it all untrue?”

“Nay!” he said. “Neither were your lovers in the past nothing. They were much to you, but you took more than you gave. Then you came to me for salvation from your own excess. And I, in my mission, I too ran to excess. I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation. Don’t run to excess now in living, Madeleine. It only means another death.”

She pondered bitterly, for the need for excessive giving was in her, and she could not bear to be denied.

And further on:

The cloud of necessity was on her, to be saved from the old, willful Eve, who had embraced many men and taken more than she gave. Now the other doom was on her. She wanted to give without taking. And that, too, is hard, and cruel to the warm body.

“I have not risen from the dead in order to seek death again,” he said.

From feeling guilty all the time for indulging my desires–or at least wanting to–I felt a surge of exhilaration at the idea of putting myself first. I was grateful to Lawrence for giving me permission to break with a Victorian sense of duty.

Now I’m wondering if a number of Trump supporters feel grateful to him for releasing them in another way—from their responsibility when it comes to racism, sexism, and homophobia. Having hidden their prejudices before—perhaps even from themselves—now they are free to express them openly. Not only that, but they can enjoy how he unloads upon all those politically correct members of the thought police, liberals like myself. If they have felt guilty in the past for harboring such thoughts or using such language, Trump has absolved them.

I can report to them, from my own vantage point, that living for yourself while turning your back on your fellow creatures is a dead-end street. Every time I’ve been tempted to take more than I gave, I’ve been reminded that true nourishment comes from supporting and being supported by a community. Likewise, acknowledging the full humanity of others is a richer and healthier way to live than retreating into tribal fears and hatreds.

Remembering the thrill I got from Nietzsche and Lawrence, however, has given me some insight into Trump’s power. He encourages us in our narrowness and sometimes that can be a powerful drug.

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Which Is Scarier? The Storm or Jesus?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 22, 2024
Rembrandt, Jesus on the Sea of Galilee

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Sunday

It took me years before I began thinking of Mary Oliver as a religious poet. Every Easter I used to share one of her poems, thinking it fortuitous that they fit the occasion so perfectly. Then I discovered that she was a practicing Episcopalian and that she wrote in the mold of what Harold Bloom has described as American Gnosticism. The tradition includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Hart Crane and includes ecstatic encounters with God—or, if you’d rather, with the soul at the heart of things—while immersed in nature.

I am therefore less surprised that I once would have been to come across an Oliver poem explicitly about Jesus–in this case, about Jesus calming the storm, which is today’s Gospel text. To set up the poem, here’s the reading from Mark (4:35-41):

When evening had come, Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Maybe
By Mary Oliver

Sweet Jesus, talking
    his melancholy madness,
       stood up in the boat
          and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
    So everybody was saved
       that night.
          But you know how it is

when something
    different crosses
       the threshold — the uncles
          mutter together,

the women walk away,
    the young brother begins
       to sharpen his knife.
          Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
    like the wind over the water —
       sometimes, for days,
          you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
    after the multitude was fed,
       one or two of them felt
          the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight
    before exhaustion,
       that wants to swallow everything,
          gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
    as they are now, forgetting
       how the wind tore at the sails
          before he rose and talked to it —

tender and luminous and demanding
    as he always was —
       a thousand times more frightening
          than the killer sea.

I’m wondering if the image of the wind tearing at the sails is how, for much of our lives, we feel caught up in tempestuous storms, which we come to normalize. In the process, Oliver points out, we lose touch with our souls:

Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
    like the wind over the water —
       sometimes, for days,
          you don’t think of it.

At times, to be sure, we get glimpses of this soul—“a tremor of pure sunlight”—but then the moment passes and we are left, “miserable and sleepy” in our storm-tossed boats. Rather than changing our lives when we are saved–you’d think we would do this “when something different crosses the threshold”–we instead forget about it and return to our muttering and our knife sharpening. “You know how it is,” Oliver says with resignation.

What stays with us, however, is Jesus’s “tender and luminous and demanding” words to us, words that demand more of us that we think we are capable of. Are we really prepared to love God and to love our neighbor? “A thousand times more frightening than this killer sea,” the poet informs us, is this injunction, which comes from one who speaks with authority (“even the wind and the sea obey him”).

Will we rise to the occasion?

Maybe.

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Mackie, Trump, and Sadistic Thrills

By Robin Bates | Published: June 20, 2024
Forster as Mackie in Three Penny Opera (1931)

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Friday

So Donald Trump, now that he’s been convicted of bank fraud, has decided to play the role of rogue. There’s an American tradition of the glamorous outlaw, and while these outlaws are not generally overweight, 78-years-old, and suffering from incontinence, nevertheless Trump is attempting to convince young Black men that he is like them. Now that he has his own mug shot, surely these thugs from hellhole cities (as he sees them) will vote for him.

In the past I’ve compared him with the highwayman Mac the Knife in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera because of his ability to slip accountability time and again. I think we get further insight into his popularity with his followers if we compare him to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s updated version of Mackie in Three Penny Opera.

While Brecht, one of the 20th century’s greatest playwrights, was famous for exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, sometimes his plays had unintended consequences. What if, rather than turning away in horror from slasher Mackie, audiences experienced a thrill from his criminality. That’s what happened when Frank Sinatra sang Mackie’s signature song and what, I think, Trump cultists experience at his rallies. They come to see which liberals he will slice up:

Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear
And he shows ’em, pearly white
Just a jack knife has Macheath, dear
And he keeps it, keeps it way out of sight

When that shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows, they begin to spread
Fancy white gloves though has Macheath, dear
So there’s rarely, never one trace of red

On the sidewalk, one Sunday mornin’
Lies a body oozin’ life
Someone’s sneakin’ ’round the corner
Could that someone, perhaps, perchance, be Mack the Knife?

[Added note: I just realized, given Trump’s terror of sharks, the irony of comparing Trump to one.]

I remember feeling a sadistic thrill when I first heard Mackie and Brown’s song about army comradery. Brecht and Weil undercut the ideal of the noble and patriotic soldier by reporting on the sordid reality, and the way they puncture the platitudes felt momentarily refreshing:

Johnny joined up and Jimmy was there
And George got a sergeant’s rating
Don’t give your right name, the army don’t care
And the life is so fascinating

Let’s all go barmy, live off the army
See the world we never saw
If we get feeling down
We wander into town
And if the population
Should greet us with indignation
We chop ’em to bits because we like our hamburgers raw!

I think of how Trump lionized, and pardoned, war criminal Eddie Gallagher, whom comrades reported as “okay to shoot anything that moved”—including a schoolgirl and an old man—and was accused of stabbing a boy to death for no reason, after which he posed with the body. While fellow soldiers described him as “freaking evil,” Trump saw him as a hero. It’s why he also admires Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

This frank avowal of human bestiality leads Trump’s followers to see him as a truth-teller and also appeals to their bloodlust. In “What Keeps Mankind Alive,” Brecht and Weil too show how humans can be bestial, but their hope is that we will work to clean up our act, not applaud:

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shrink the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

Richard Slotkin, in Gunfighter Nation, describes America’s long history of “regeneration through violence.” The myth that won the west, he writes, is that people had to descend into savagery in order to establish civilization. Many of Trump’s followers see him in this light, with liberals standing in for the savages. Bestial acts are called for given the battle that must be waged.

Or at least imagining bestial acts. Trump is reality television, something you can enjoy without actually getting hurt. Unfortunately, dismantling the guardrails of democracy and weaponizing the justice department will lead to actual violence.

Further instance of Trumpian rhetoric: Trump advisor, radio personality, performance artist, and general grifter Steve Bannon—who thanks to a Trump pardon is not in jail for embezzling funds meant to build a border wall–keeps upping the rhetoric. A fiery speech he delivered in Detroit last Saturday included the following threats if Trump is reelected:

We’re coming after Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, the senior members of DOJ that are prosecuting President Trump. Jack Smith. And this is not about vengeance. This is not about revenge. This is not about retribution. This is about saving this republic! We’re gonna use the Constitution and the rule of law to go after you and hold you accountable.

And:

We’re going to take apart the FBI. The FBI, the American Gestapo…There’s not going to be any FBI.

And in conclusion, as reported by Newsweek:

Ending his speech, Bannon issued a rally call, asking the audience, “Are you prepared to fight? Are you prepared to give it all? Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield? I can’t hear you and they can’t hear you!” People cheered, clapped, and shouted in support before beginning a “USA USA USA” chant.

Bannon concluded his speech and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s very simple: Victory or Death!”

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