Cops’ Invisible Disciplinary Records

By Robin Bates | Published: June 9, 2020

Wednesday

To address the issue of unchecked police behavior, I am repurposing a blog essay I wrote on H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man in December, 2017. At the time, the GOP was planning massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that would blow up the deficit while providing peanuts for everyone else. As I noted, they appeared to have learned a version of Trump’s Access Hollywood pronouncement, “And when you’re a star, they let you [kiss beautiful women]. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Same with the GOP, when you control all levels of government and have dispensed with normal checks and balances, you can do anything.

Similarly, if the misconduct of racist cops is routinely buried so that they can shove, beat and even kill people with impunity, they will inevitably do so. I see that, in response to public pressure, the New York legislature has just voted to make cop disciplinary records public for the first time in 50 years.

Few maxims are truer than “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s no accident that, upon learning the secret of invisibility, Wells’s protagonist immediately starts violating social norms. It’s an aspect of human nature that Plato explores in the Gyges ring parable that inspired Wells’s story.

The parable appears in Book 2 of The Republic. Arguing with Socrates that people behave justly only because they fear the consequences of not doing so, Glaucon recounts how the shepherd Gyges, after finding a ring that renders him invisible, proceeds to seduce the queen, murder the king, and become king himself. While people might publicly applaud a good man that didn’t take advantage of such a ring, Glaucon states that they would in actuality regard him as a fool.

Rather than such freedom making Gyges happy, Socrates counters that he will always be slave to his appetites. While I believe this to be true, this is of scant consolation to Gyges’s victims, just as George Floyd finds scant consolation in the fact that his killers may never find deep peace. Wells, however, has a different focus, showing how delicious it is to act on dark impulses.

Griffin describes a “feeling of extraordinary elation” when he realizes that people can’t see him. Confiding his history to his college friend Kemp, he says he immediately burned down the house so that others wouldn’t discover his secrets:

“You fired the house!” exclaimed Kemp.

Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail—and no doubt it was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

He uses the word “impunity” again further on:

Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me.

Griffin proceeds to engage in the same range of behavior that we are seeing from cops, from shoving to outright killing. At the beginning, his social infractions are minor:

My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.

When Kent asks about “the common conventions of humanity,” Griffin replies that they are “all very well for common people.”

As Griffin’s madness grows, so do his dark ambitions. Thinking he has successfully enlisted Kemp, he plots ways to wield total power:

“And it is killing we must do, Kemp.”

“It is killing we must do,” repeated Kemp. “I’m listening to your plan, Griffin, but I’m not agreeing, mind. Why killing?”

“Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes; no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them.”

Note that he uses one of Trump’s favorite words here: “dominate.” He’s prepared to use violence if necessary.

A sadistic thrill comes with asserting your dominance over others. It’s not as fulfilling as serving humankind, as Socrates preaches and enlightened police know, but Griffin, racist cops, and authoritarians like Trump don’t care. They prefer the rush of acting with impunity.

The Invisible Man is transparent. America’s police forces, not so much.

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Love in the Time of Covid-19

By Robin Bates | Published: June 8, 2020

Tuesday

I had meant to blog on my 47th wedding anniversary yesterday but had to wait until I could track down a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, which seemed the most appropriate text. After all, the love in the novel, finally consummated under the cholera flag, is about the ups and downs of a long-time relationship. “Fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights,” to be exact.

First, however, I turn to a poem, Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” since it too captures how our marriage has evolved. To be sure, I didn’t know Julia as a child, nor did I marry her at 14, nor did she timidly keep her eyes focused on the ground and scowl for a year (quite the contrary!). As with the speaker, however, something beautiful and deep has grown out of our youthful confusions.

I love the images of time piling up, even though in the 16-year-old speaker’s case it is only five months, not 48 years. Moving as we are into the autumn of our own life, I can see as as paired butterflies, changing with the seasons:

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza have loved each other all their lives, but only when they are old and her husband has died can they finally come together. They embark on a river cruise and then realize that, if they can get the captain to fly the cholera flag, they can sail without stopping at any ports.

The captain, inspired by their love, brings his own love on board and the four of them are still sailing when the book reaches its end. Navigating under the cholera flag gives their love an extra edge, and while our situations aren’t the same, I have noticed that living with Julia in the age of the coronavirus has also made life seem especially precious. Since we are both retired, life is quiet, but we are aware of illness and death on the horizon. Our time in relative isolation reminds me of that boat ride.

The book ends with the captain trying to figure out how to get out of “the mess he had gotten into with the cholera flag,” at which point Florentino Ariza broadens his vision:

Florentino Ariza listened to him without blinking. Then he looked through the windows at the complete circle of the quadrant on the mariner’s compass, the clear horizon, the December sky without a single cloud, the waters that could be navigated forever, and he said:

“Let us keep going, going, going, back to La Dorada.”

Fermina Daza shuddered because she recognized his former voice, illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and she looked at the Captain: he was their destiny. But the Captain did not see her because he was stupefied by Florentino Ariza’s tremendous powers of inspiration.

“Do you mean what you say?” he asked.

“From the moment I was born,” said Florentino Ariza, “I have never said anything I did not mean.”

The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked.

Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.

“Forever,” he said.

In a 1988 New York Times review, novelist Thomas Pynchon reflects upon the meaning of this end, arriving at a conclusion that touches on my own decades-long relationship:

This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality – youthful idiocy, to some–may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. 

And later:

There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance–at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.

Starting off as youthful idiots, Julia and I have steered among the hazards of skepticism and mercy. I know the journey won’t actually last forever, that we sail under a flag of mortality. Yet with love at the tiller and remembrance casting a glow over the years, I find that my feelings have deepened. I am realizing what the captain realizes while gazing at the lovers: “that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.”

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Russian Lit and Moscow’s Gentleman

By Robin Bates | Published: June 7, 2020

Monday

I’m close to finishing Amor Towles’s enchanting Gentleman in Moscow and use today’s post to share some of its literary allusions. (I previously wrote about the novel here.) Although Towles spends more time looking at food than at literature, he has talked of falling in love with Russia’s golden age writers when young (Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky) and later with Russia’s early 20th century avant-garde artists, including the poet Mayakovsky. Both periods show up in the novel.

At one point, protagonist Count Rostov is challenged to come up with three worthy Russian contributions to the world (in addition to Vodka, that is). To win the bet, he begins with Russian literature:

“Number one,” said the Count, adding a pause for dramatic effect: “Chekhov and Tolstoy.”
The German let out a grunt.
“Yes, yes. I know what you’re going to say: that every nation has its poets in the pantheon. But with Chekhov and Tolstoy, we Russians have set the bronze bookends on the mantelpiece of narrative. Henceforth, writers of fiction from wheresoever they hail, will place themselves on the continuum that begins with the one and ends with the other. For who, I ask you, has exhibited better mastery of the shorter form than Chekhov in his flawless little stories? Precise and uncluttered, they invite us into some corner of a household at some discrete hour in which the entire human condition is suddenly within reach, if heartbreakingly so. While at the other extreme: Can you conceive of a work greater in scope than War and Peace? One that moves so deftly from the parlor to the battlefield and back again? That so fully investigates how the individual is shaped by history, and history by the individual? In the generations to come I tell you there will be no new authors to supplant these two as the alpha and omega of narrative.”

Two and three, incidentally are the first scene of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and caviar. About Nutcracker, Rostov explains,

Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest. And that is why Tchaikovsky seems to have captured the sound of it better than anyone else. I tell you that not only will every European child of the twentieth century know the melodies of The Nutcracker, they will imagine their Christmas just as it is depicted in the ballet; and on the Christmas Eves of their dotage, Tchaikovsky’s tree will grow from the floor of their memories until they are gazing up in wonder once again.

At another point in the novel, we move from Russia’s Golden Age to its 20th century poets, Shortly after the revolution, exuding the confidence many felt about the creative potential released by the Russian Revolution, Rostov’s poet friend Miska explains the implications for literature:

“But what of poetry?” you ask. What of the written word? Well I can assure you that it too is keeping pace. Once fashioned from bronze and iron, it is now being fashioned from steel. No longer an art of quatrains and dactyls and elaborate tropes, our poetry has become an art of action. One that will speed across the continents and music to the stars.

Had the Count overheard such. A speech spilling forth from a student in a coffee house, he might have observed with a glint in his eye that, apparently, it was no longer enough for a poet to write verse. Now, a poem must spring from a school with its own manifesto and stake its claim on the moment by means of the first-person plural and the future tense, with rhetorical questions and capital letters and an army of exclamation points! And above all else, it must be novaya.

Sadly for Miska, the energies of avant-garde art, which swept the world, are subsequently declared counterrevolutionary, to be replaced by Gorky’s once fresh but increasingly cloying social realism (now socialist realism). Mayakovsky shoots himself and others fall silent or are silenced:

[W]hen Miska headed to the Central House of Writers, he happened to pass the statue of Gorky on Arbatskaya Square, where the brooding statue of Gogol once had stood. Other than Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky had been Miska’s greatest contemporary hero.

“Here was a man,” said Miska to himself (as he stood in the middle of the sidewalk ignoring the passersby), “who once wrote with such fresh and unsentimental directness that his memories of youth became our memories of youth.”

But having settled in Italy, he was lured back to Russia by Stalin in ’34 and set up in Ryabushinsky’s mansion—so that he could preside over the establishment of Socialist Realism as the sole artistic style of the entire Russian people….

“And what has been the fallout of that?” Miska demanded of the statue.
All but ruined, Bulgakov hadn’t written a word in years. Akhmatova had put down her pen. Mandelstam, having already served his sentence, had apparently been arrested again. And Mayakovsky? Oh, Mayakovsky…
Miska pulled at the hairs of his beard.

Back in ’22, how boldly he had predicted to Sasha that these four would come together to forge a new poetry for Russia. Improbably, perhaps. But in the end, that is exactly what they had done. They had created the poetry of silence.

“Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Miska. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”

It so happens that Count Rostov owes his own life, indirectly, to a Miska poem. Under the tsar, he has allowed one of Miska’s working class lyrics to appear under his name—Miska would have been imprisoned for it—and the Bolsheviks, when they come to power, don’t shoot him because of his having supposedly written it. Instead, he is condemned to live the rest of his life in the Metropol Hotel.

Here’s one final literary passage that I enjoy for its humor. Petty bureaucrats increasingly control every detail of the hotel’s service, including its fabled restaurant. Where personal interchanges once ruled, now everything must be written down. Count Rostov, who has become the head waiter, is irritated:

Now in all of Russia, there was no greater admirer of the written world than Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. In his time, he had seen a couplet of Pushkin’s sway a hesitant heart. He had watched as a single passage from Dostoevsky roused one man to action and another to indifference—in the very same hour. He certainly viewed it as providential that when Socrates held forth in the agora and Jesus on the Mount, someone in the audience had the presence of mind to set their words down for posterity. So let us agree that the Count’s concerns with this new regimen were not grounded in some distaste for pencils and paper.

One last note about the novel: Every once in a while, I will encounter in fiction an insight that touches me so closely that I sit back in wonder and gratitude. Such occurred when Towles describes “the Confederacy of the Humbled.”

Rostov is conversing with a Russian movie star who once thrilled silent screen audiences but has now become a “has been.” Since Rostov himself was once a privileged aristocrat, they form a bond. Rather than retreat into denial or self-pity, Anna and Rostov embrace humility:

Like the Freemasons, the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.

My own fall was not as precipitous but I remember descending from hotshot new professor to one of the mass of St. Mary’s employees, eclipsed by new stars. It was a shock at first but I strove for a balanced perspective, which has served me well.

We watch such a perspective at work through the entire 30+ years that Rostov spends in the Metropol. Never once is he bitter about what has occurred. For me, it’s the novel’s chief attraction.

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Time to Revisit “I Have a Dream”

By Robin Bates | Published: June 6, 2020
1963 March on Washington

Spiritual Sunday

Given all that’s happened this past week, I am reposting that most poetic of speeches—essentially a prose poem–delivered by Martin Luther King from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. In chilling contrast with King’s vision, this past week we saw secret police preventing the public from approaching the monument.

I’m struck by the multiple references in King’s speech to police brutality and his insistence that we counter “physical force with soul force.” “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” he advises us.

Revisiting the “I Have a Dream” speech takes me back to the time when my father took me to hear King speak in Charleston, South Carolina. The year was 1967, I was 16 years old, and the moment I most recall is King saying, “Therefore, I say not, ‘Burn baby burn’ but ‘Build, baby, build.’ King was responding to the riots underway at the time, with black militancy putting his own non-violent approach on the defensive.

In retrospect, King’s non-violence was more productive, and I believe the same will prove true of our current non-violent protest marches, which are garnering widespread public support.

King makes much better use of the Bible than did Donald Trump when he had Lafayette Park forcefully cleared of protesters for his photo op before the St. John’s Episcopal Church. King draws on the Exodus journey; on Amos (“justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”); on Isaiah (“every hill and mountain shall be made low”); and on Jesus’s admonition to build on rock rather than sand, not to mention his call for love and universal brotherhood. In the speech’s rousing finale, King also taps into the black Gospel tradition, with its deep roots in opposing slavery and Jim Crow.

Echoes of King’s language and the tradition out of which he arose could be heard in George Floyd’s memorial services. This is what real Christianity looks like:

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free; one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; one hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.

So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy; now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice; now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content, will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the worn threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy, which has engulfed the Negro community, must not lead us to a distrust of all white people. For many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of Civil Rights, “When will you be satisfied?”

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one; we can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No! no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations.  Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

You have been the veterans of creative suffering.

Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.  Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama — with its vicious racists, with its Governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification — one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be plain and the crooked places will be made straight, “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brother-hood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire; let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York; let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania; let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado; let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that.

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia; let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee; let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

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Sartre Captures White Privilege

By Robin Bates | Published: June 4, 2020
Spanish edition of Sartre’s Respectful Prostitute

Friday

A hard-hitting essay about white privilege by Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton brings to my mind Jean Paul Sartre’s play The Respectful Prostitute (1946). Sartre’s existential point is that we are always responsible for our actions, which is Glanton’s point as well.

After noting that “white people don’t like watching hardcore racism,” Glanton goes on to say,

But somehow, white people always find a way to get over it. You post your angst on social media to show which side you’re on.

Then before you know it, your drive-by rage is over.

You conclude that the terrible incident doesn’t affect you directly. So you drift back into oblivion, convinced there’s nothing you can do about racist cops or the racist society that breeds them.

In addition to posting on social media, Glanton could have mentioned the various groups piggybacking on Black Lives Matter to cause mayhem. When the disturbances end, they will go back to their white existences, leaving blacks to once again clean up the mess and suffer the consequences.

The column concludes,

Racists are counting on you to continue doing nothing. And you will not disappoint them.

Racists know some of you better than you know yourselves.

Inspired by the 1931 Scottsboro Incident, in which two prostitutes lied about being raped by nine black teenagers traveling through Alabama, Respectful Prostitute shows that whites always side with whites when push comes to shove, regardless of their professed principles.

In Respectful Prostitute, a black man has witnessed a white man shooting another African American, as has a white prostitute. To dispense with their testimony, the murderer’s brother (Fred Clarke) wants Lizzie to testify that the surviving black man has raped her. In that case, he will be lynched and the brother will escape prosecution.

Lizzie has principles, however, at least when it comes to causing the death of an innocent man. Clarke, who has slept with her the night before to set her up, starts pressuring her to change her story:

LIZZIE: What does that mean?
 FRED: It means testifying against a white man in behalf of a nigger.
LIZZIE: But suppose the white man is guilty.
FRED: He isn’t guilty.
LIZZIE: Since he killed, he’s guilty.
FRED: Guilty of what?
LIZZIE: Of killing!
FRED: But it was a nigger he killed.
LIZZIE: So what?
FRED: If you were guilty every time you killed a nigger—
LIZZIE: He had no right.
FRED: What right?
LIZZIE: He had no right.
FRED: That right comes from up North. [A pause.] Guilty or not, you can’t punish a fellow of your own race.
LIZZIE: I don’t want to have anyone punished. They’ll just ask me what I saw, and I’ll tell them.

And further on:

FRED: What is there between you and this nigger? Why are you protecting him?
LIZZIE: I don’t even know him.
FRED: Then what’s the trouble?
LIZZIE: I just want to tell the truth.
FRED: The truth! A ten-dollar whore who wants to tell the truth! There is no truth; there’s only whites and blacks, that’s all.

As a prostitute, Lizzie is vulnerable to pressure, but she still manages to hold out against Fred. She’s less successful, however, against his senator father, who makes her feel sorry for the white killer, whose life will be upended by a murder charge. After softening her up by telling her about the murderer’s mother, he appeals to her patriotism:

THE SENATOR: Look: suppose Uncle Sam suddenly stood before you. What would he say?
LIZZIE [frightened]: I don’t suppose he would have much of anything to say to me.
THE SENATOR: Are you a Communist?
LIZZIE: Good Lord, no!
THE SENATOR: Then Uncle Sam would have many things to tell you. He would say: “Lizzie, you have reached a point where you must choose between two of my boys. One of them must go. What can you do in a case like this? Well, you keep the better man. Well, then, let us try to see which is the better one. Will you?”
LIZZIE [carried away]: Yes, I want to. Oh, I am sorry, I thought it was you saying all that.
THE SENATOR: I was speaking in his name. [He goes on, as before.] “Lizzie, this Negro whom you are protecting, what good is he? Somehow or other he was born, God knows where. I nourished and raised him, and how does he pay me back? What does he do for me? Nothing at all; he dawdles, he chisels, he sings, he buys pink and green suits. He is my son, and I love him as much as I do my other boys. But I ask you: does he live like a man? I would not even notice if he died.”
LIZZIE: My, how fine you talk.
THE SENATOR [in the same vein]: “The other one, this Thomas, has killed a Negro, and that’s very bad. But I need him. He is a hundred-per-cent American, comes from one of our oldest families, has studied at Harvard, is an officer—I need officers—he employs two thousand workers in his factory—two thousand unemployed if he happened to die. He’s a leader, a firm bulwark against the Communists, labor unions, and the Jews. His duty is to live, and yours is to preserve his life. That’s all. Now, choose.”

The African American man has a wife and kids as well, but he’s more of an abstraction whereas she can imagine the pain the white family will undergo. The same mental process helps explain why white juries often refuse to convict murdering cops. Nevertheless, after Lizzie signs the Senator’s statement, she feels that she’s “been had—but good!”

Her complicity isn’t at the end. Though he slept with her originally to entrap her, Fred finds that he needs her. He uses the full force of male and class entitlement to enforce his will, just as white entitlement has prevailed in the murder case. It’s enough to turn her.

In the final scene, Lizzie has just been hiding the black man—although another has been lynched for the shooting—and when Fred discovers him and tries to kill him, Lizzie is prepared to shoot Fred when he returns. He proves to be very persuasive:

FRED [approaching her slowly]: The first Clarke cleared a whole forest, just by himself; he killed seventeen Indians with his bare hands before dying in an ambush; his son practically built this town; he was friends with George Washington, and died at Yorktown, for American independence; my great-grandfather was chief of the Vigilantes in San Francisco, he saved the lives of twenty-two persons in the great fire; my grandfather came back to settle down here, he dug the Mississippi Canal, and was elected Governor. My father is a Senator. I shall be senator after him. I am the last one to carry the family name. We have made this country, and its history is ours. There have been Clarkes in Alaska, in the Philippines, in New Mexico. Can you dare to shoot all of America?
LIZZIE: You come closer, and I’ll let you have it.
FRED: Go ahead! Shoot! You see, you can’t. A girl like you can’t shoot a man like me. Who are you? What do you do in this world? Do you even know who your grandfather was? I have a right to live; there are things to be done, and I am expected to do them. Give me the revolver. [She gives him the revolver, he puts it in his pocket.] About the nigger, he was running too fast. I missed him [A pause. He puts his arm around her.] I’ll put you in a beautiful house, with a garden, on the hill across the river. You’ll walk in the garden, but I forbid you to go out; I am very jealous. I’ll come to see you after dark, three times a week—on Tuesday, Thursday, and for the weekend. You’ll have nigger servants, and more money than you ever dreamed of; but you will have to put up with all my whims, and I’ll have plenty! [She yields a bit to his embrace.] Is it true that I gave you a thrill? Answer me. Is it true?
LIZZIE [wearily]: Yes, it’s true.
FRED [patting her on the cheek]: Then everything is back to normal again. [A pause.] My name is Fred.

Normal for white America, as Glanton points out, is not having to think about police racism and white privilege. The police themselves are often Lizzies, used by those with money to clean up the messes left by egregious income inequality. In compensation, they are often given tacit permission to act out their power and racist fantasies within their limited domain.

Not that Sartre lets Lizzie, or anyone, off the hook, just as the cops must be held accountable for their brutality. We’re all responsible for our choices. As Sartre famously puts it, we are all condemned to be free.

His play, however, reveals that some are freer than others. It’s easier for privileged whites to exercise their freedom than for blacks and poor whites.

Respectful Prostitute has bearing on one other point that Glanton makes. Speaking of Alice Cooper, the Central Park stroller who claimed than a peaceful African American birdwatcher was attacking her after he called for her to leash her dog, Glanton notes that she’s not the real culprit:

Question why you allowed the Amy Cooper story to distract you from the issue of police brutality. Her lie about a black man attacking her in Central Park ws repulsive and she deserved to be rebuked, but it was only a blip in the larger arena of racism.

White women have been telling lies on black men since they were first brought to America in chains in 1619, and white women have been complicit. The most famous liar was Carolyn Bryant, who claimed Emmett Till whistled at her.

One of the main reason racism thrives is because white people too often miss the most important point. The biggest issues isn’t that a white woman lied. It’s the racist system that allowed Bryant’s husband his friends to drag Till out of bed, beat him to death and toss his body in the river—without repercussions.

It’s clear, in Respectful Prostitute, that the real villains are the white establishment, not the prostitute who lies under pressure.

Note also that what Lizzie gets from her surrender is another form of servitude. Her life will not be as hard as being black—with whiteness come certain privileges—but in her new life she’ll have to put up with Clarke’s whims (“and I’ll have plenty”).

Real freedom would come with Lizzy and the black man–the police and Black Lives Matter–joining forces against the Senator Clarkes of the world. What are the odds that will happen?

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What Would Lucille Clifton Say?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 3, 2020
Lucille Clifton

Thursday

The other day I received a note, to be forwarded to my wife, from a woman who is reassembling the Women’s Writing Group that Lucille Clifton gathered at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the 1990s.

How would Lucille respond to the current state of affairs, Susan Pigman wondered. The question sent me combing through Lucille’s Collected Poems (2012).

While Lucille wouldn’t have written about all the racist killings we have seen in recent years–there have been far too many–the plight of blacks in America was always on her mind. In “whose side are you on?” she writes,

i am on the dark side always
the side of my daughters
the side of my tired sons.

Perhaps she would have written about George Floyd the way she wrote about James Byrd, the Jasper, Texas man who in 1998 was tied to a truck by racists and dragged to his death.

 In “jasper   texas   1998” she speaks as though from Byrd’s dismembered head before calling out in anguish, “why and why and why/should i call a white man brother?”

Lucille always writes about what she’s feeling at the moment and, in this instance, singing “We Shall Overcome” at Byrd’s funeral rings hollow. Feeling defeated, she concludes—as though from Byrd’s perspective but also from her own–“i am done with this dust.    i am done.”

i am a man’s head hunched in the road.
i was chosen to speak by the members
of my body.    the arm as it pulled away
pointed toward me, the hand opened once
and was gone.

why and why and why
should i call a white man brother?
who is the human in this place,
the thing that is dragged or the dragger?
what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.
if i were alive i could not bear it.
the townsfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
i am done with this dust.    i am done.

Sometimes one feels just so fed up–hope has bled out–that one wants to give up. “I am done.”

But of course, such discouragement is only momentary with Lucille. Down one day, she’ll be back up the next. I imagine her looking at Trump, who now has called in the military, and recalling a poem she wrote following the Kent State killings:

only to keep
his little fear
he kills his cities
and his trees
even his children. (“after kent state”)

Lucille is beloved because she taps into our strength as well as into our pain. Her own life was hard: in addition to being a black woman in America, she was sexually abused by her father, lost children and a husband, and underwent multiple illnesses, including cancer and kidney failure. That’s why “won’t you celebrate with me” has such power:

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model,
born nonwhite and a woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Clifton often makes it clear that she doesn’t owe her survival just to her own resilience, however. The black community has always provided her with a bedrock of support:

listen children
keep this in the place
you have for keeping
always
keep it all ways

we have never hated black

listen
we have been ashamed
hopeless tired mad
but always
all ways
we loved us

we have always loved each other
children all ways

pass it on

Under Trump’s rule, privileged whites are finally getting a small glimpse of what African Americans have had to endure for centuries. I suppose that’s a silver lining of sorts, making it clear that solidarity is the only way forward.

To end today’s post with a poem that is not just about survival but about creating a new and better future, here’s “new bones”:

we will wear
new bones again.
we will leave
these rainy days,
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.
worlds buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new bones.
other people think they know
how long life is
how strong life is.
we know

When Lucille assures us that life is long and strong, I take heart. Pass it on.

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Achebe vs. Trump’s Heart of Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2020
Chinua Achebe

 Wednesday

I’m worried that we’re replaying 1968, that horrific year of war, riots, and assassinations that culminated in the election of Richard Nixon. There’s a significant difference, however: back then, it was easier for Nixon and other such politicians to characterize the rioters as a black mob, devoid of individual characteristics. I believe it’s more difficult to do that now.

Helping change that perception has been Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s 1977 critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902).  While most Americans have never heard of Achebe, his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” or even Heart of Darkness itself, the Achebe-Conrad debate is foundational reading in many literature departments. (The texts, along with Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, all appear in the second volume of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.)  Those who teach required Composition and Intro to Literature classes have been shaped by the debate, even when they don’t teach the works, and those classes have in turn influenced the way that humanities, social science, science, and professional departments talk about race.

In their turn, graduates have gone out to change workplaces. To look just at television news, one sees far more reporters of color, commentators of color, and expert guests of color, whose presence and articulate views undermine stereotypes. Trump worshippers and reactionary police may lump everyone together, but I’m noticing considerably more pushback from the media than I saw 50 years ago.

Cell phone cameras have also changed the conversation. One can see, for instance, that many of the rioters, vandals and looters have been white, not black, and we’re even seeing black protesters confronting white vandals, whom they accuse of smearing them. Trumpists may not be open to racial nuance, but America increasingly is.

Let’s therefore go back to Achebe’s essay, which objects to the narrator’s vision of Africans. He targets the following passage:

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us — who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign — and no memories.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were …. No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.

Marlow, as Achebe observes, has reduced Africans to a racist metaphor, sorrowfully concluding that Europeans are no better than barbaric Congolese.

Important though Achebe’s essay is, Things Fall Apart (1958) provides an even more compelling refutation. That’s because, once one has experienced the richness and diversity to be found in the author’s depiction of Nigerian village life, one no longer tolerates racist caricatures. If literature’s greatest strength is capturing humanity in its full complexity, then Conrad’s work falls short in this regard.

Conrad is strongest at capturing Europe’s own heart of darkness. He arrived at his insights from witnessing King Leopold’s horrific colonialism, and the 20th century would confirm his vision time and again. America had a Conradian revelation of its own when, after believing with Obama that we had reached a new stage of enlightenment, we discovered the old prejudices were alive and well.

Unlike the European women who appear in Heart of Darkness, Trump doesn’t even pretend to hold enlightened Christian values. He’s like the rapacious ivory seekers that Marlow compares to pilgrims:

They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. 

Meanwhile, with his military threats and his orders for governors to “dominate” their streets, Trump also reminds me of the colonial official who has a Congolese man beaten for a fire that breaks out:

Black figures strolled about listlessly, pouring water on the glow, whence proceeded a sound of hissing; steam ascended in the moonlight, the beaten nigger groaned somewhere. “What a row the brute makes!” said the indefatigable man with the mustaches, appearing near us. ‘Serve him right. Transgression—punishment—bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That’s the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations for the future.” 

In the novella, Kurtz is appalled when, on his deathbed, he looks back over his time in Africa, sees how far he has fallen from his ideals, and exclaims, “The horror! The horror!” Marlow is impressed with this final self-judgment.

One can’t imagine Trump delivering such a self-verdict, and the same increasingly seems to be true of his Republican enablers, who refuse to lift a finger each time he trashes another cherished ideal. Were he to start putting his enemies’ heads on stakes, I imagine Maine Senator Susan Collins doing no more than wrinkling her brow and expressing concern.

But back to Trump and the protesters: I think (and pray) that he’s going to have a harder time establishing himself as “the law and order candidate” than Nixon did. Most people are seeing him as the lawless one, not the protesters, most of whom are peaceful. He may find that the 1968 political playbook doesn’t work as well this time around.

If such proves to be the case, Achebe will have played a role in that.

Follow-up note: I see, from a recent New York Times interview, that the remarkable Michael Eric Dyson–academic, preacher, radio host, and cultural commentator–would remove Heart of Darkness from the canon (“it’s done so much damage in fashioning savage notions of Africa”) and replace it with Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I’ve sung the praises of Kindred multiple times (for instance, here) but, for the reasons stated above, would demote rather than entirely remove Heart of Darkness. It gets at the corrupt soul of white colonialism, even if gets Africa wrong.

I see that Dyson also admires philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who after Percy Shelley is my own favorite literary theorist). I also applaud his naming Milkman Dead from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as his favorite literary hero and Iago as his favorite villain. (No one in Shakespeare is worse, in my opinion.) I’m intrigued that he chooses the enigmatic Reinhart–an elusive figure from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man who assumes many masks–as his favorite anti-hero.

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When Grief Turns Violent

By Robin Bates | Published: June 1, 2020

Tuesday

I dread the political aftermath of the riots we are witnessing. I deeply sympathize with those mourning the death of George Floyd and others killed by police and white vigilantes, and, if any of them are engaging in property destruction and vandalism, part of me invokes Marat’s line in Peter Weis’s play Marat/Sade: “What are a few looted mansions compared to their looted lives?”

[Important caveat: I do not extend my sympathies to those who are shamelessly piggybacking on the demonstrations for their own psychological and political agendas, people who care nothing for George Floyd or, for that matter, the communities or the livelihoods that they are trashing with their wanton destruction.]

My fear is what happened after America’s 1960s riots. Richard Nixon took full advantage of American racism to lock in an electoral advantage that has continued for decades, his “Southern Strategy.” The strategy helped elect our current president, and I worry that Trump will use it to eke out another victory. George W. Bush, after all, got reelected on a national security platform after plunging us into a senseless war.

In Weis’s play, playwright Sade sarcastically points out to Marat that, instead of a liberating revolution, France instead got “fifteen glorious years” of Napoleonic rule.

For those protesters who, in their anger and sadness, causes mayhem so that others will feel their pain, Beowulf provides a cautionary tale. The archetype of grief turning violent is Grendel’s Mother.

GM has lost her son and is determined to make someone, anyone, pay. She lashes out and kills Aeschere, who has had nothing to do with the killing of her son:

She had pounced and taken one of the retainers
in a tight hold, then headed for the fen.
To Hrothgar, this man was the most beloved
of the friends he trusted between the two seas.
She had done away with a great warrior,
Ambushed him at rest.

She leaves behind heartbreak:

The bargain was hard,
both parties having to pay
with the lives of friends. And the old lord,
the gray-haired warrior, was heartsore and weary
when he heard the news: high higest-placed adviser,
his dearest companion, was dead and gone.

Further on, when Beowulf asks the Danish king about the cause of his sorrow, Hrothgar replies,

Rest? What is rest? Sorrow has returned.
Alas for the Danes! Aeschere is dead.
He was Yrmenlaf’s elder brother
and a soul-mate to me, a true mentor,
my right-hand man when the ranks clashed
and our boar-crests had to take a battering
in the line of action. Aeschere was everything
the world admires in a wise man and a friend.
Then this roaming killer came in a fury
and slaughtered him in Heorot. Where she is hiding,
glutting on the corpse and glorying in her escape,
I cannot tell; she has taken up the feud…

The monsters in Beowulf are archetypes of the violence that exists at the core of Anglo-Saxon society, so we see out-of-control vengeance at work throughout the epic. For instance, the spirit of Grendel’s Mother haunts the so-called Finnsburg Episode, involving the Frisian king Finn and the Danish king Hnaef. Previously, a fragile peace has been worked out through a diplomatic marriage, but it falls apart when Finn’s allies, the Jutes, attack the Danes. Hnaef is killed in his subsequent battle with Finn, as is Finn’s half-Danish son, but since neither side wins a decisive victory, they have to co-exist in uneasy proximity. For our purposes, think of them as reactionary police and communities of color.

Finn, like a big city mayor, knows he’s sitting on a tinderbox and does everything he can to maintain peace between the Frisians and the Danes. He swears a solemn oath “that battle survivors would be guaranteed honor and status” and that “no infringement by word or deed, no provocation would be permitted.” In a decree that sounds like the banning of hate speech, he says that  any of his Frisians who “stir[ ] up bad blood with insinuations or taunts” will experience “the blade of the sword.”

Grendel’s Mother lurks in the hearts of the Danes, however, and it’s only a matter of time before everything explodes. Hengest, Hnaef’s brother and now Danish leader, has been brooding the entire time:

     Hengest stayed,
lived out that whole
     resentful, blood-sullen
winter with Finn,
     homesick and helpless.

With spring comes the time for revenge:

Thus blood was spilled,
     the gallant Finn
slain in his home…
     The wildness in them
had to brim over.
     The Hall ran red
with blood of enemies.
     Finn was cut down,
the queen brought away…

While the matter seems to end there, Beowulf as a whole makes it clear that the thrust and counterthrust of vengeance never ends. The last third of Beowulf is filled with a non-ending blood feud between the Geats and the Swedes that lasts for generations. Here’s a characteristic passage, described by Beowulf:

Then over the wide sea Swedes and Geats
battled and feuded and fought without quarter.
Hostilities broke out when Hrethel died.
Ongentheow’s sons were unrelenting,
refusing to make peace, campaigning violently
from coast to coast, constantly setting up
terrible ambushes around Hreosnahill.
My own kith and kin avenged
these evil events, as everybody knows,
but the price was high: one of them paid
with his life. Haethcyn, lord of the Geats
met his fate there and fell in the battle.
Then, as I have heard, Hygelac’s sword
was raised in the morning against Ongentheow,
his brother’s killer. When Eofor cleft
the old Swede’s helmet, halved it open
he fell, death-pale: his feud-calloused hand
could not stave off the fatal stroke.

If Beowulf at the end of his life is driven to dragon depression, which is how I read the final monster, it is because he looks back and sees nothing but one damn death after another. He reminds me of those who are looking at the latest clashes between cops and black communities and wearily wondering whether they will ever end. “How long, oh Lord, how long?”

In the epic, Beowulf defeats Grendel’s Mother by wielding a sword forged by warrior giants in the golden age before the flood—which is to say, by higher warrior ideals. I see our version of this sword as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Unfortunately, when he is old, Beowulf loses faith in this sword and can no longer confidently slay monsters with it. He needs the younger generation to help him out.

That’s what I’m hoping for in our current circumstances. We cannot yield to Grendel’s Mother’s violent grief but must, like the young Beowulf, invoke higher ideals when we confront murderous police and a racist president. Playing on their turf will only swallow us up in a never-ending blood feud. To defeat them, it will also take old and young working together. Therein lies our final hope.

Further note: Here’s Joe Biden making a similar point in Tuesday’s Philadelphia speech about turning to higher ideals when we are in mourning. I can’t think of a better contemporary illustration of how Beowulf slays destructive grief:

Just a few days ago, marked the fifth anniversary of my son Beau’s passing of cancer. And there’s still moments when the pain is so great, it no different than the day I sat in that bed as he passed away. But I also know that the best way to bear loss and pain is to turn it into, that anger and anguish into purpose. And Americans know what our purpose is as a nation, it has to be guided, it has to be guided, it’s guided us from the very beginning.

It’s been reported the day that president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, little Yolanda King came home from school and jumped in her daddy’s arms and said, “Oh daddy,” she said, “Now we’re never going to get our freedom.” Through daddy was reassuring, strong and brave, he said, “No, don’t worry, baby. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be all right.” Amid the violence and fear, Dr. King, he persevered. He was driven by his dream, of a nation where justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Then in 1968, hate cut him down in Memphis. Two days before Dr. King was murdered, he gave a final Sunday sermon to Washington, where he told us that though the arc of the moral universe is long, he said it bends towards justice. And we know we can bend it because we have, we have to believe that’s still, that’s our purpose. It’s been our purpose in the very beginning, to become a nation where all men and women are not only created equal, but they’re treated equally, not just created equal, but treated equally, to become a nation, to find in Dr. King’s words, not only by the absence of tension, but by the presence of justice. It’s not enough just to not have tension, but justice.

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In Aeneid, It’s the Wives Who Riot

By Robin Bates | Published: May 31, 2020
Minneapolis building burns during riots

Monday

Are any of us surprised, after years of watching police and self-proclaimed vigilantes abusing and killing African Americans—and of white juries letting them go free—that we finally have 1960-style riots on our hands, complete with burning buildings? Donald Trump encouraging police officers to rough up their suspects has led directly to the George Floyd murder, although the primal racism that I explored a couple of weeks ago is also a key factor. The literary image that comes to my mind is the rioting wives in Book V of The Aeneid.

It is one of the strangest episodes in Virgil’s epic. Heretofore, the wives haven’t been mentioned at all, let alone been named, yet here they are, mad as hell and setting their husbands’ ships on fire.

African Americans will relate to their pent-up rage, even though the parallel isn’t exact. To this point, Aeneas has considered, and rejected, a series of sites in which to settle down: Thrace, the Trojan settlement of Buthrotum, the Stophades, Crete, Carthage (with Dido), and now a Trojan settlement on current-day Sicily. However, Aeneas’s sense of destiny, voiced by Jupiter, decrees that he set his eyes on the Latin kingdom further north, even though he could settle for their present location. After seven years of wandering, the wives aren’t having it.

The Trojan men, who don’t bother to consult them, are off playing sports. (More precisely, they’re honoring the death of Aeneas’s father with Olympic-style funeral games). Juno, the goddess of the hearth who opposes Aeneas’s imperial ambitions, sends down her messenger Isis to stir things up:

                               Juno brooding, scheming,
her old inveterate rancor never sated. Iris flies,
arcing down on her rainbow showering iridescence,
and no one sees the virgin glide along the shore,
past the huge assembly, catching sight of the harbor
all deserted now, and the fleet they left unguarded.
But there, far off on a lonely stretch of beach
the Trojan women wept for the lost Anchises.
Gazing out on the deep dark swells they wept
and wailed: “How many reefs, how many sea-miles
more that we must cross! Heart-weary as we are!”

They cried with one voice. A city is what they pray for.
All were sick of struggling with the sea. So down
in their midst speeds Iris—no stranger to mischief—

Iris takes the form of wife Beroe and proceeds to enflame the rest:

Oh, my poor doomed people! What is Fortune saving you for,
what death-blow? Seven summers gone since Troy went down
and still we’re swept along, measuring out each land, each sea—
how many hostile rocks and stars?—scanning an endless ocean,
chasing an Italy fading still as the waves roll us on.…
What prevents us from building walls right here,
presenting our citizens with a city? Oh, my country,
gods of the hearth we tore from enemies, all for nothing,
will no walls ever again be called the walls of Troy?
We’re never again to see the rivers Hector loved,
the Simois and the Xanthus? No, come, action!
Help me burn these accursed ships to ashes.
The ghost of Cassandra came to me in dreams,
the prophetess gave me flaming brands and said:
‘Look for Troy right here, your own home here!’
Act now. No delay in the face of signs like these.
You see? Four altars to Neptune. The god himself
is giving us torches, building our courage, too.”
Spurring them on and first to seize a deadly brand,
she held it high in her right hand, shook it to flame
and with all her power hurled the fire home.

A peacemaker intervenes but the wives, like the rioters, are too aroused to halt for long:

[A]t first the women wavered, looking back
at the ships with hateful glances, torn between
their hapless love for the land they stood on now
and the fated kingdom, calling still—when all at once
the goddess towered into the sky on balanced wings,
cleaving a giant rainbow, flying beneath the clouds.
Now they are dumbstruck, driven mad by the sign
they scream, some seize fire from the inner hearths,
some plunder the altars—branches, brushwood, torches,
they hurl them all at once and the God of Fire unleashed
goes raging over the benches, oarlocks, piney blazoned sterns.

As I say, the wives have been ignored to this point, but their riot gets the men’s full attention. Aeneas’s son Ascanius, sounding like various city mayors, veers out of the horse race that he’s winning and comes riding in to save the ships:

Out in the lead, Ascanius, still heading his horsemen,
still in triumph, swerves for the ships at full tilt,
his breathless handlers helpless to rein him back,
and finding the camp in chaos, shouts out: “Madness,
beyond belief! What now? What drives you on?
Wretched women of Troy, it’s not the enemy camp,
the Greeks—you’re burning your own best hopes!
Look, it’s your own Ascanius!”
Down at his feet he flung his useless helmet, the one 
he donned
when he played at war, acting out mock battles….

Although the rioters retreat, the ships are still on fire:

Despite all that, the flames, the implacable fire
never quits its fury. Under the sodden beams
the tow still smolders, reeking a slow, heavy smoke
that creeps along the keels, the ruin eating into the hulls,
and all their heroic efforts, showering water, get them nowhere.
At once devoted Aeneas ripped the robe on his shoulders,
called the gods for help and flung his hands in prayer:
“Almighty Jove, if you still don’t hate all Trojans,
if you still look down with your old sense of devotion,
still respect men’s labors, save our fleet from fire!
Now, Father, snatch the slim hopes of the Trojans
out of the jaws of death! Or if I deserve it,
come, hurl what’s left of us down to death
with all your angry bolts—
overwhelm us here with your iron fist!”

Jove helps out with a timely rain shower, after which the Trojans arrive at a good compromise. Counselor Nautes advises Aeneas that those who wish to should venture on while the rest can stay with Acestes, head of the Sicily settlement:

You have Acestes, a Trojan born of the gods,
a ready adviser. Invite him into your councils.
Make your plans together. Hand them over to him,
the people left from the burnt ships and those worn out
by the vast endeavor you’ve begun, your destiny, your fate.
The old men bent with age, the women sick of the sea,
ones who are feeble, ones who shrink from danger:
set them apart, and exhausted as they are,
let them have their walls within this land.
If he lends his name, they’ll call the town Acesta.”

Our own solutions are not so simple since the problems are systemic. Racism runs deep within police departments and deep within the country as a whole. Given rightwing cops, white nationalist provocateurs, anarchist groups, and opportunistic politicians, we can expect more mischief. Fortunately, we also have wise counselors, including rapper Tiger Mike, Rev. Al Sharpton, and various enlightened mayors, who are attempting to find a way forward.

The burning boats have sent a warning signal that we cannot ignore. We must make productive use of them.

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