Politics Got You Down? Read Rasselas

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2024

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Friday

Uncertainty about the 2024 election is driving Democrats mad at the moment. Why does the race continue so close, we wonder, given that Joe Biden has created a stellar economy while Donald Trump attempted a coup and is now—with his threats of retribution and Project 2025—promising a fascist takedown of American democracy if reelected? While the situation is worrisome, however, worrying ourselves sick over the matter is not going to change things.

When I find myself consumed by despair over this state of affairs, I sometimes think of Samuel Johnson’s astronomer in his philosophic novel Rasselas. Rasselas is on a journey to discover the secret of happiness and thinks he has found it in a learned scientist who has given over his life to studying the heavens. This man spends as much time charting interstellar space as political junkies spend surfing the internet, a comparison I make because similar results ensue. First, here’s Rasselas’s mentor Imlac reporting on the astronomer:  

I have just left the observatory of one of the most learned astronomers in the world, who has spent forty years in unwearied attention to the motion and appearances of the celestial bodies, and has drawn out his soul in endless calculations.

And now here’s the result, which Imlac discovers after noticing the astronomer’s depression and pressing him on it. The astronomer reveals that he does not possess the key to happiness after all:

Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit.  I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons.  The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds at my call have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command.  I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab.  The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.  I have administered this great office with exact justice, and made to the different nations of the earth an impartial dividend of rain and sunshine.  What must have been the misery of half the globe if I had limited the clouds to particular regions, or confined the sun to either side of the equator?

Just like many who follow the ups and downs of politics, the astronomer doesn’t differentiate between worrying about cataclysmic events and thinking he has control over them. And while he acknowledges he can’t prove his power, he trusts his vibes:

I…shall not attempt to gain credit by disputation.  It is sufficient that I feel this power that I have long possessed, and every day exerted it.

After describing the encounter, Imlac warns the Rasselas party,

He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is?  He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire…and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion.  

The problem is particularly acute, Imlac says, for those who have a strong sense of responsibility and who feel guilty for not doing more:

“No disease of the imagination,” answered Imlac, “is so difficult of cure as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt; fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other….[W]hen melancholy notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the faculties without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude or banish them.

Those who take their citizenship duties seriously may find conscience mixing with fantasies of power—we all have them—and consequently finding themselves plunged into melancholy or depression.

So what is to be done? Part of the problem is solitude, so Rasselas and his party pull the astronomer out of his observatory and get him to join them in a variety of activities, which include conversing with their lovely handmaiden Pekulah. In other words, they offer him perspective and a sense of proportion. Once they do, he comes to realize that he is doesn’t carry the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. As Imlac sums it up,

Open your heart to the influence of the light, which from time to time breaks in upon you; when scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not stand to parley, but fly to business or to Pekuah; and keep this thought always prevalent, that you are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue nor vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural favors or afflictions.

For concerned citizens, flying to business can include contacting members of Congress, writing postcards, knocking on doors, donating, and of course voting while flying to Pekuah may involve romantic outings, partying with friends, exercising, and so on. The key is stepping away from that black hole that is the political internet.

This remedy works with the astronomer, who reflects,

I now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to prey upon me in secret…I hope that time and variety will dissipate the gloom that has so long surrounded me, and the latter part of my days will be spent in peace.

To which Imlac replies, “Your learning and virtue may justly give you hopes.”

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What the Shell Tells Us about Biden

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2024
Charles Victor Thirion, Listening to the Seashell

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Wednesday

Although I know there are many Democrats who believe that Joe Biden should step down and let someone else (there’s disagreement as to whom) take his place, I remain convinced that staying with him is the Democrats’ best chance to retain the presidency. Some of my belief comes from Chris Bouzy, election analyst and founder of the Twitter-alternative Spoutible, who time and again has demonstrated remarkable predictive powers. Bouzy thinks the Democrats will win convincingly—the presidency and both chambers of Congress—if Biden stays and that they will lose the presidency and Senate both if he steps aside.

Bouzy, of course, is not omniscient and could be wrong so I’m not dismissing the fears of Biden doubters. But I take a different tack in today’s post and share a thought that is allowing me to sleep a little easier. It’s based on a James Stephens poem that came to mind as I was strolling on a South Carolina beach with my five-year-old grandson Ocean. Ocean has become obsessed with collecting shells:

The Shell
By James Stephens

AND then I pressed the shell
Close to my ear
And listened well,
And straightway like a bell
Came low and clear        
The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas,
Whipped by an icy breeze
Upon a shore
Wind-swept and desolate.
It was a sunless strand that never bore  
The footprint of a man,
Nor felt the weight
Since time began
Of any human quality or stir
Save what the dreary winds and waves incur.  
And in the hush of waters was the sound
Of pebbles rolling round,
Forever rolling with a hollow sound.
And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go
Swish to and fro
Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey.
There was no day,
Nor ever came a night
Setting the stars alight
To wonder at the moon:  
Was twilight only and long, cold tentacles of slimy grey.
And waves that journeyed blind—
And then I loosed my ear … O, it was sweet
To hear a cart go jolting down the street.

 “A shore wind-swept and desolate,” “long, cold tentacles of slimy grey,” “waves that journeyed blind”—those are all images that would apply to a second Trump presidency.

I can also imagine enough voters thinking the same way. Uncle Joe is our comfortable cart. He may not arouse intense passions—he doesn’t conjure up what the Romantics called “the dark sublime”—but he’s familiar and safe. For all Trump’s effort to tar him with “Biden Crime Family” and other projected accusations, Biden simply jolts along. It’s how he routed his Democratic opponents in the 2020 primaries, how he beat an incumbent president later that year, and how he could well be reelected this year.

Americans may grumble a lot. But when their lives are going fairly comfortably—as they are—they are not prone to vote in disruptive change. Trump foes and Trump fans alike see him as a chaos agent, and more Americans than not are averse to chaos. This will become clearer as the election nears.

To be sure, Biden may indeed choose, or be pressured, to step down. But so far, Joltin’ Joe has not yet left and gone away.

 

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When at the Beach, Nature Takes Over

By Robin Bates | Published: July 9, 2024
Potthast, Children at the Beach

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Wednesday

We’re currently at North Myrtle Beach with my two sons, their wives, and their five children. A William Meredith beach poem, therefore, is perfect for the occasion. Familiar as he is with New England winters, Meredith feels impelled to contrast the sand with snow and notes, in winter, “the mind is in charge of things.” In the summer, by contrast, nature appears to take over:

He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.

As he lies in the sun on the beach, the still mindful speaker notes, at first, that the Yale-educated nanny (or babysitter) uses grammatically incorrect language as she addresses her charges:

Why doesn’t the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

By the end of the poem, however, he has surrendered to nature and given up the need to exert any kind of control, including grammatical control:

It is just as well, [the children] have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day.  He just lays there.

Here’s the poem:

Rhode Island
By William Merideth

Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
again, like the rented animals in Aïda.
In the late morning the land breeze
turns and now the extras are driving
all the white elephants the other way.
What language are the children shouting in?
He is lying on the beach listening.

The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn’t the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.
No matter how often you make love
in August you’re always aware of genitalia,
your own and the half-naked others’.
Even with the gracefulest bathers
you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises,
mammals disporting themselves in a blue element,
smelling slightly of fish.  Porpoise Hazard
watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.

In the other hemisphere now people
are standing up, at work at their easels.
There they think about love at night
when they take off their serious clothes
and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets.

Today the children, his own among them,
are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese,
using the colonial dialect of Brazil.
It is just as well, they have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day.  He just lays there.

There will be time—after Labor Day—to return to our easels. For the moment, just go with the flow. And since understanding is no longer a priority, the children can speak any language they choose.



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Still Relevant? Whittier’s Suffering Quakers

By Robin Bates | Published: July 8, 2024
Illus. from Whittier’s “How the Women Went from Dover”

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Tuesday

For the second day in a row I report on a timely article that grounds itself in an obscure 19th century poem. Thom Hartmann of Substack’s Hartmann Report cites John Greenleaf Whittier’s “How the Women Went from Dover” to highlight the GOP’s plans for American women should it regain the presidency. The plans are as chilling as the poem.

Hartmann points out that the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” along with rulings and opinions by Trump-appointed Federal District Judge Michael Kacsmaryk and rightwing Supreme Court justices, all point to attempts to reestablish control over women. As he puts it, they “have some very specific plans for nationally resetting the legal status of half the American population, and they’re using religion and ‘sin’ to justify their bizarre imposition of 18th century values”:

They explicitly want to reverse the status of women’s legal, workplace, marital, and social equality and return to a time when biblical law dictated that men ran everything from the household to business to governance and law.

Among ideas that have been mentioned are enforcing the Comstock Act, which was originally passed to prohibit shipping conveying obscene matter, crime-inciting matter, or certain abortion-related matters through the U.S. system. While generally considered defunct, it’s still on the books and Alito and Thomas on the Supreme Court have mentioned it approvingly. Through it, Hartmann says, Republicans “will be able to ban the shipment of anything, from drugs to surgical devices, that can be used to produce an abortion. This could even end most hospital-based abortions by essentially outlawing the equipment needed to perform them.”

Also in the Right’s targets is no fault divorce, which has been a boon to women in abusive marriages. And the drug mifepristone, used in early abortions. And abortions generally, of course. As Hartmann bitterly notes,

Like people who love the death penalty (and in two states now state legislators have called for the death penalty for women who get abortions), they want to be able to torture them and watch them suffer; they want them to experience humiliation, and feel mortification for their sin of rejecting a pregnancy initiated by a man who was ordained by their god to be their master and the head of their household.

In the eyes of Trump judge Kacsmaryk, “so-called marriage equality” has put America “on a road to potential tyranny” and reflects a “complete abuse of rule of law principles.” Elsewhere, Hartmann notes, the judge has complained that the sexual revolution

ushered in a world where an individual is “an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology” and where “marriage, sexuality, gender identity and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

And then there’s Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, perhaps the GOP’s next vice-presidential candidate, making the case that women would be happier if they were more willing to tolerate domestic violence:

One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace [is the idea that] these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.

All of which leads Hartmann to conclude, as he transitions to Whittier’s poem, that “torturing women for religious reasons is nothing new for American theological zealots.”

“How the Women Went from Dover” is based on a real life incident in 1662 in which three Quakers—Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose—so enraged Dover’s Congregational Church that the minister and the church elder lobbied the crown magistrate to have them punished. The three women were stripped naked, tied to the back of a horse-drawn cart by their wrists, and then dragged through town while receiving ten lashes each. Whittier writes:

The tale is one of an evil time,
When souls were fettered and thought was crime,
And heresy’s whisper above its breath
Meant shameful scouring and bonds and death!

Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip
And keener sting of the constable’s whip,
The blood that followed each hissing blow
Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.

Apparently it wasn’t enough for the women to be whipped in Dover so the reverend got the punishment extended to 11 nearby towns, spread over a distance of 80 miles of snow-covered roads. The next whipping occurred in Hampton:

Once more the torturing whip was swung,
Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.
“Oh, spare! they are bleeding!” a little maid cried,
And covered her face the sight to hide.

After that, however, the horror of the spectacle caused a general revolt as local authorities refused to carry out the order.

With shame in his eye and wrath on his lip
The Salisbury constable dropped his whip.
“This warrant means murder foul and red;
Cursed is he who serves it,” he said.

“Show me the order, and meanwhile strike
A blow at your peril!” said Justice Pike.
Of all the rulers the land possessed,
Wisest and boldest was he and best.

He scoffed at witchcraft; the priest he met
As man meets man; his feet he set
Beyond his dark age, standing upright,
Soul-free, with his face to the morning light.

Looking back at the incident, Whittier reflects,

The tale is one of an evil time,
When souls were fettered and thought was crime,
And heresy’s whisper above its breath
Meant shameful scourging and bonds and death!

Then he reassures today’s women that, if their lives are better, it’s because of women such as these:

How much thy beautiful life may owe
To her faith and courage thou canst not know,
Nor how from the paths of thy calm retreat
She smoothed the thorns with her bleeding feet.

One can only pray that the thorns have been smoothed. Put the GOP back in power and who knows where we’ll end up? When Justice Alito defended the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade, he cited a witch-hanging judge from the 18th century, but why settle for turning the clock back to the 1700s when you could turn it back to the 1600s?

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Trump’s Judges, Pale Riders

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2024
Gustave Doré, Death on a Pale Horse

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Monday

We’ve been so focused on Donald Trump’s coup attempt and his attacks on our election system that we’ve mostly missed a coup that has already made substantial progress. According to Asha Rangappa of the Substack blog Freedom Academy, our Trumpian Supreme Court has begun to (1) pave the way for Trump’s return to the presidency and (2) has revealed how it will support that presidency if Trump prevails. In making her case, the senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs makes powerful use of a Percy Shelley poem.

Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy” was written in response to the so-called Peterloo Massacre, where calvary charged a demonstration of 60,000 people peacefully protesting high food prices and lack of freedom. Of those 18 died and nearly 700 were severely injured by saber cuts and trampling. Rangappa quotes the following two verses:

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a scepter shone;
On his brow this mark I saw –
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’

I won’t go into the intricacies of just how much the Supreme Court is proving itself to be in Trump’s corner, but Rangappa focuses on the Court’s ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution if they engage in official conduct and that, in determining whether the conduct is official or unofficial, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives. As Rangappa points out,

This is an astonishing statement, because it effectively means that it does not matter if a President uses the official levers of power with corrupt intent, for personal gain, or as retribution. In other words, the Court engages a sleight of hand where a critical distinction between lawful and unlawful conduct — the heart of criminal law, which rests on whether a person acted with a specific state of mind, or mens rea — ceases to exist when it comes to the President. Once this distinction is erased, the office of the presidency is basically a get out of jail free card, enabling the President to do pretty much anything that could plausibly be characterized as “official.”

 And who, in the end, would distinguish between whether an act is official or unofficial? Why, Trump’s Supreme Court. In their eyes, the Justice Department’s current prosecutions of Trump are “sham” (thus Trump needs immunity), but Trump, if reelected, would not be prohibited from coming up with “official” reasons for his own Justice Department to prosecute his enemies. As Rashagappa observes, the court “believes in a unitary [all powerful] executive, but only when a Republican is president.”

 Shelley’s angry poem shows that judges and the executive authorities are working hand in glove, and to these he adds the church. Given how fundamentalist Christian are getting what they want from both Trump and this Supreme Court, the poem is even more relevant.

Shelley was in Italy when the Peterloo massacre occurred and so wrote,

As I lay asleep in Italy,
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

First he calls out Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the repressive government minister largely associated with the Peterloo crackdown:

I met Murder on the way–
He had a mask like Castlereagh–
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him.

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew…

Next there’s the judiciary:

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

And then the church, with a side glance at Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth:

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

All of which culminates in the image of Anarchy riding in that Rangappa cites. And when Anarchy rides in on his white horse, he is embraced by many of the same types who are embracing Trump—which is to say, lawyers (the Federalist Society, responsible for stacking the Supreme Court) and priests (fundamentalist preachers):

For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
`Thou art God, and Law, and King.

We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.’

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering — `Thou art Law and God.’ —

Then all cried with one accord,
`Thou art King, and God, and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’

Shelley does manage to end his poem on an optimistic note. The Peterloo massacre was so horrific, he says, that those in power will be ashamed. Furthermore, they will lose the support of potential allies—members of the military who fought against Napoleon—who “will turn to those who would be free, “Ashamed of such base company.” Finally, the massacre will wake up and inspire those who have slumbered:

`And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

`And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again — again — again–

`Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number–
Shake your chains to earth like dew                  
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many — they are few.’

Awaking to stop our own judges means voting in a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress since only by doing so can the rogue judiciary be stopped. And if judicial plotting is not enough to get you to the polls, check out the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” MAGA’s fascist plans should Trump regain the White House. 

Plans which his Supreme Court appears to see as its mission to bring to fruition.

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This Altar the Earth Herself Has Given

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2024

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Sunday

Our church vestry, of which I am the senior warden, recently was confronted with a small but interesting challenge. Years ago our old church altar, constructed in 1911, was replaced and now occupies a prominent place in the old rectory, sometimes serving as a buffet, sometimes as a place upon which flowers and ornamental lamps sit. It has various hand carvings by a prominent local woodworker, and one of the descendants of this woodworker’s apprentice—the apprentice having herself contributed carvings to the altar’s side panels—would like the altar for herself. The issue of ownership has led to Vestry discussions resembling those to be found in Jan Karon’s Mitford series, about a quaint little Episcopalian parish in rural North Carolina.

I don’t know how we’ll decide—the altar, while no longer functioning in its original capacity, was after all a gift to the church—but the request has gotten us to take a closer look at it. I mention it here because it reminds me of a wonderful Malcolm Guite sonnet about his own church’s old wooden altar. While ours isn’t  centuries old, many of Guite’s observations still apply. Here it is:

This Table

The centuries have settled on this table
Deepened the grain beneath a clean white cloth
Which bears afresh our changing elements.
Year after year of prayer, in hope and trouble,
Were poured out here and blessed and broken, both
In aching absence and in absent presence.

This table too the earth herself has given
And human hands have made. Where candle-flame
At corners burns and turns the air to light
The oak once held its branches up to heaven,
Blessing the elements which it became,
Rooting the dew and rain, branching the light.

Because another tree can bear, unbearable,
For us, the weight of Love, so can this table

The other tree Guite mentions is the cross, which bore weight of Love. So did our old altar, which year after year bore the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation. As the “changing elements” were “poured out here and blessed and broken,” churchgoers experienced both God’s aching absence and God’s absent presence.

I love how Guite tracks back to when the altar was an oak tree, which reminds me of the old medieval poem “Dream of the Rood.” It’s as though that tree also was blessing the elements—the dew and the rain—and becoming one with them. As Jesus becomes one with us through the eucharist, “branching the light.”

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The Beowulfian Case for Keeping Biden

By Robin Bates | Published: July 4, 2024
Andimayer, Beowulf against the Dragon

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Friday

It so happens that Beowulf directly deals with the Joe Biden dilemma currently facing Democrats. The 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem also offers us a very workable solution.

Before laying it out, however, allow me to take a detour through Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and one of Aesop’s fables, which also weigh in on the question of whether Biden should keep running or step down. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch recently applied Ginsberg’s most famous poem to what he sees as a pile-on by media and liberal columnists. “Over the course of a remarkable weekend,” he wrote,

I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down.

Ginsberg’s famous poem, which deals with the drug-addled beat generation, begins,

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

I don’t know that Bunch’s characterization is entirely fair. A number of these columnists, who I have come to rely on over the years, simply want what is best for America and are terrified—as am I—of a Trump return. When I read and weigh the different arguments, however, I pay attention to what they are proposing as alternatives and to how well they understand the process of running for president. Too often, what I see puts me in mind of Aesop’s fable about the mice and the cat:

Long ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case. “You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighborhood.”

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?” The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said:

“It is easy to propose impossible remedies.”

With the possible exception of choosing Kamala Harris, which might address the complex money, organizational, and legal hurdles involved in swapping out a candidate, I haven’t encountered any plausible scenarios of how this particular cat would be belled—which is to say, scenarios that are less risky than staying with the president. Both Biden and Trump have lost a step but only one of them is a fascist and a threat to democracy.

On to Beowulf, which deals with the problem of dragons. Now, dragons in the poem are symbolic of kings who have become ineffective. But there are different kinds of ineffective kings. The worst are like Heremod, who is contrasted with the good king Sigemund, who slays dragons. Trump is our Heremod, a king who becomes increasingly paranoid and vindictive as he grows older:

His rise in the world brought little joy
to the Danish people, only death and destruction.
He vented his rage on men he caroused with,
killed his own comrades, a pariah king
who cut himself off from his own kind,
even though Almighty God had made him
eminent and powerful and marked him from the start
for a happy life. But a change happened,
he grew bloodthirsty, gave no more rings 
to honor the Danes. He suffered in the end
for having plagued his people for so long:
his life lost happiness.

Other kings, rather than lash out, simply sink into passive depression, like Hrethel, who crawls into bed after losing a son and never gets up again. There’s also the Last Veteran, who having seen all around him die retreats into a funeral barrow, which becomes a dragon’s lair. (Which is to say, as I read the incident, that he becomes a human dragon.)

And then there is Beowulf in his last days, who is far superior to Heremod (because he is generous) and Hrethel and the Last Veteran (because he doesn’t sink into depression). Nevertheless, he still has a dragon dimension.

 Beowulf has had a spectacularly successful 50-year reign, but when dragonhood begins to descend, he makes what some consider to have been Biden’s mistake. Instead of passing the kingdom along to a successor, he insists on remaining king, thinking that only he can defeat the foe. Biden, some of his critics have charged, thinks that only he can defeat Trump, while Beowulf thinks the same about the dragon. As he instructs his warriors,

Men at arms, remain here on the barrow, 
safe in your armor, to see which one of us
is better in the end at bearing wounds
in a deadly fray. This fight is not yours,
nor is it up to any man except me
to measure his strength against the monster
or to prove his worth. I shall win the gold
by my courage, or else mortal combat,
doom of battle, will bear your lord away.  

One reason for Beowulf’s confidence, and for Biden’s, is his past record. And yes, there is some hubris involved. Thinking that one can defeat the dragon by oneself is itself a dragon trait:

Beowulf spoke, made a formal boast
for the last time: “I risked my life 
often when I was young. Now I am old,
but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight
for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only
abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open.”

I promised you a workable solution for our current situation and here it is. I start with the premise that Biden is not suffering from dementia and that he’s doing an adequate job running the country. (In fact, more than adequate compared to his predecessor.) As I don’t hear anyone credible saying differently—and as replacing comes with risks no less than keeping—then I think all Democrats should be giving him a full-throated endorsement, regardless of any private reservations. Indeed, we are hearing such endorsements from such people as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, California Governor Gavin Newsome, and Vice-President Harris, all names that one hears as possible replacements.

What does such an endorsement look like? In the poem, Wiglaf overlooks Beowulf’s egotism and comes to his aid. His words are not untinged with criticism—their leader should never have undertaken this task alone—but that is all irrelevant now. Wiglaf’s words to his fellows are inspiring and could function as a call to wavering Democrats:

                                           And now, although
he wanted this challenge to be one he’d face
by himself alone—the shepherd of our land,
a man unequalled in the quest for glory
and a name for daring—now the day has come
when this lord we serve needs sound men
to give him their support. Let us go to him,
help our leader through the hot flame 
and dread of the fire. As God is my witness,
I would rather my body were robed in the same
burning blaze as my gold-giver’s body
than go back home bearing arms.
That is unthinkable, unless we have first
slain the foe and defended the life
of the prince of the Weather-Geats. I well know
the things he has done for us deserve better.
Should he alone be left exposed
to fall in battle? We must bond together, 
shield and helmet, mail-shirt and sword.

Then he wades into “the dangerous reek,” telling his leader,

 Go on, dear Beowulf, do everything
you said you would when you were still young
and vowed you would never let your name and fame
be dimmed while you lived. Your deeds are famous,
so stay resolute, my lord, defend your life now 
with the whole of your strength. I shall stand by you.

Here’s what awaits Geat society—and America–if followers fail to do everything in their power to support their leader:

So it is goodbye now to all you know and love
on your home ground, the open-handedness,
the giving of war-swords. Every one of you
with freeholds of land, our whole nation,
will be dispossessed, once princes from beyond
get tidings of how you turned and fled 
and disgraced yourselves. A warrior will sooner
die than live a life of shame.

And here’s what awaits Beowulf’s society—and what awaits Democrats—if their leader is successful:

[Wiglaf] saw beyond the seat
a treasure-trove of astonishing richness, 
wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold,
glittering gold spread across the ground, 
the old dawn-scorching serpent’s den
packed with goblets and vessels from the past…

And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold,
hanging high over the hoard,
a masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light 
so he could make out the ground at his feet
and inspect the valuables.

Make no mistake, there will be no liberated treasure, no flowering of freedom, if the Republicans win. The last two GOP administrations, with their billionaire tax cuts and their botched responses to world crises, were disasters, unlike the last three Democratic administrations. Everything we hold dear about our country will be dragged through the mud, and worse, if Trump prevails.

And there’s a further lesson to be learned from Wiglaf, which starts with a contrast. Anglo-Saxon society in the 8th century was more heavily dependent upon a king than we are. Whether society thrived or whether everyone ended up dead or enslaved could all come down to the leadership of one man. But we’re not like that. We have Wiglafs running the major departments and agencies, Wiglafs in positions of authority in all 50 states, Wiglafs making sure that people get their Social Security checks and their Medicare payments and their essential services, Wiglafs scattered throughout the voting public. In other words, Biden isn’t governing all by himself. He has chosen good people to work under him, and his policies and leadership have, so far, led to significant improvements, not to mention electoral victories all around the country.

So if Biden needs to go to bed by 8 am, if he needs the aid of a teleprompter to communicate, if he walks more haltingly and talks a little slower and debates less sharply than he once did, big deal. The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is a record of good governance. And it’s not like his opponent is any healthier or more articulate or more on top of the issues than he is. In fact, his opponent is proving himself more unhinged and dangerous every time he gets up to speak.

Trump is an isolated Heremod while Biden is an aged Beowulf willing to allow Wiglafs to help him accomplish the nation’s mission. Keep that image in mind before, like Beowulf’s other followers, you run for the woods.

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Whitman Celebrates a Diverse America

By Robin Bates | Published: July 3, 2024
Norman Rockwell, Spirit of America (1974)


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Thursday – July 4th

Walt Whitman wrote “I Hear America Singing” in 1860, which is to say, a year before the Civil War. In other words, he expressed faith in American democracy at a time when its future was even more in doubt than it is today. In Whitman’s time, his mechanics, carpenters, and masons would soon be spilling blood over the question of whether this “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure.”

Today, with Trump’s Supreme Court attempting to invest all power in (1) an imperial presidency and (2) its own invented rules, we ask the same question. Lest we lose faith, we have Whitman to remind us that our greatness lies in our diversity.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

And to supplement these Americans with a few more–to make clear that Whitman’s America is ethnically diverse–here are some from Song of Myself:

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders,
On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,
She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.

In other words, the essence of America is not white Christian.

When I was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Ljubljana’s English Department in 1987, my officemate, an old Slovenian Melville scholar, once observed that he couldn’t figure out how America worked. He knew what it meant to be Slovenian—after all, there was the Slovenian language and a fairly homogeneous Slovenian culture—but what did it mean to be American?

When I thought about it, the American experiment really seemed to me to be extraordinary. To think there could be a unified country made of multiple ethnicities, religions, languages (don’t forget the Native American languages), and diverse past histories was an extraordinary exercise in hope. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution, supplemented by the poem on the Statue of Liberty and other key documents (including Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech), have somehow held us together even in the worst times.

Our poets and novelists have made a major contribution to this unifying narrative.

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Why Fiction Terrifies People

By Robin Bates | Published: July 2, 2024
Book jacket for my forthcoming book

Wednesday

I recently completed proofreading the galleys (if that’s what they’re still called) of my forthcoming book, which of course is tremendously exciting. Then I had the slightly unnerving experience of reading a New York Times essay about another soon-to-published book that explores some of the same themes and includes many of the same thinkers and ideas.  Like my book, Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality is concerned with the recent spate of book bannings, and we both note that there is a long history (2500 years long) of people freaking out over stories.

When similar books come out at the same time, it’s often because authors are tapping into the same zeitgeist or spirit of the times. Nor are Gold and I the only ones since in 2022 there was also Peter Brooks’s 2022 study Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. Indeed, it’s good there’s a cluster of such books since they’re more likely to capture people’s attention that way. My book will be appearing (I think) sometime this summer whereas Gold’s is slated for an October release.

In today’s post I compare my ideas with Gold’s, especially noting how we arrive as almost diametrically opposite conclusions. Gold notes that the fear of fiction is a cyclical phenomenon, waxing and waning, and she points to various eruptions over the centuries. Then, as I do, she does a deep dive into Plato’s anxieties, which led him to ban the stories of Hesiod and Homer from his utopian republic. In my view, one reason why Plato banned Homer was because he himself was in love with the poet and was frightened over the effect that The Iliad and The Odyssey had over him. When he was in the grip of Homer’s mesmerizing fictions, he had difficulty exercising his “right reason,” which for Plato is philosophy’s highest aim.

Gold believes that fiction causes panic most commonly in democracies. That’s because

the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience — and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe — of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.

I agree with Gold’s point but approach from the opposing angle, seeing fiction as a powerful tool for progressives. Looking at how Romantics like Blake and Wordsworth celebrated the lives of chimney sweeps, shepherds, leech gatherers, and other lower class figures, I write that

the door had been opened for poets and writers to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Émile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on.

Like Gold, however, I also examine why MAGA is attacking certain books. For instance, if they have repeatedly attacked the novel Beloved, it’s because Toni Morrison addresses two of their sore spots (to put it mildly), America’s dark racial past and a woman claiming control over her own body. (The slave owners steal Sethe’s breast milk and then whip her to an inch of her life.) In the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, a Republican operative complained that her son had been traumatized by being assigned the book in high school, and candidate Glenn Younkin used the story as the final argument in his successful bid.

Gold and I both look at two works that played a role in slave times and the Jim Crow south, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Clansman (which became Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation). Where we differ, however—and it’s a major difference—is that she wants to draw hard and fast lines between literature and life whereas I want to dismantle them. Gold writes,  

Fiction writers can insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value. This isn’t an anti-political stance but, rather, a highly political one. It tells readers to go get their values elsewhere, to stop demanding that fiction provide the difficult labor of soul-making — to do that work themselves.

Now, I agree that literature should not be yoked to an ideological agenda. In fact, a number of thinkers I explore argue specifically against doctrinaire literature, including Sir Philip Sidney, Karl Marx, Frederic Engels, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Terry Eagleton. But by potentially changing the way people see the world, literature (so I argue) sometimes changes history and so can hardly be separated from morality or social values.

Percy Shelley provides specific examples. The great poets of the past, he says, have sowed the seeds for the ending of slavery and the liberation of women. “It exceeds all imagination,” he writes, “to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.”

“Poets,” the Romantic poet concludes, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Or to quote someone who is not an activist poet, Harold Bloom makes a compelling case that Shakespeare changed the fundamental way that humans see themselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Bloom writes In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom writes that whereas that fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Jonson ideograms, the Bard created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…”

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, meanwhile, argues that literature is essential in a multicultural democracy for producing informed voters. How else are we to empathize with fellow citizens who are otherwise unlike us?

Sounds like soul-making to me.

Further thought: Gold appears to throw in her lot “art for art’s sake” crowd and elevate aesthetics above all, concluding her piece with Oscar Wilde’s contention, in his preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” But Wilde’s novel was profoundly moral, providing deep comfort to many closeted gay men when it came out, some of whom had it all but memorized. For that matter, the Aesthetic movement was itself a protest against capitalism, which dismissed anything (such as art) that could not be monetized. Wilde makes this clear in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”

In my own book, I describe a constant tension between literature as a fun activity (aesthetic delight) and literature as a practical tool. Matthew Arnold talks of lit as sweetness and light while John Stuart Mill makes it his goal to balance aestheticism and utilitarianism. The best literature, I contend, is always both/and, never either/or.

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