A Literary Survey of What Plagues Mean

By Robin Bates | Published: April 19, 2020
Michiel Sweerts, Plague in an Ancient City (1652)

Monday

The search for meaning becomes urgent in times of crisis, and for much of history this search has occurred within a religious context. Although many started looking for secular answers following the scientific revolution, the search itself has remained constant. By surveying literature’s handling of the plague over the centuries, we get some perspective on our own search for meaning.

Sophocles’s Oedipus sends his brother-in-law to the Delphic Oracle to inquire about the cause of a plague that has struck Thebes. It so happens that the gods are punishing the city because Oedipus has unknowingly violated foundational taboos. To end the plague, the contamination must be expelled.

The plague that shows up in The Aeneid (29-19 BCE) alerts Aeneas that he and his father have misinterpreted an oracle. They thought they were to begin their new enterprise in Crete, but in fact they should plant their flag in Italy. The plague therefore sends them to sea again:

Our ships were no sooner hauled
onto dry land, our young crewmen busy with weddings,
plowing the fresh soil while I was drafting laws
and assigning homes, when suddenly, no warning,
out of some foul polluted quarter of the skies
a plague struck now, a heartrending scourge
attacking our bodies, rotting trees and crops,
one whole year of death . . .
Men surrendered their own sweet lives
or dragged their decrepit bodies on and on.
And the Dog Star scorched the green fields barren,
the grasses shriveled, blighted crops refused us food.

In both these instances, there’s something that can be done to defeat the plague: bring your lives more in alignment with divine will.

For Defoe, as I discussed yesterday, the plague is also believed to be sending messages. As a Puritan, the narrator of Journal of the Plague Year (1722) blames it on Charles II’s licentious reign, which was a reaction to England’s 18-year experiment with a Puritan republic. The plague, he observes, gets Charles’s Court to clean up its act (albeit only temporarily):

[T]he very Court, which was then gay and luxurious, put on a face of just concern for the public danger. All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music-houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such-like doings, which had bewitched the poor common people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenances even of the common people. Death was before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their graves, not of mirth and diversions.

While narrator H.F. is convinced that God is sending messages, however, some scientific thinking has also crept into his world view. Therefore, he’s skeptical that a comet foretold the plague:

I saw both these stars, and, I must confess, had so much of the common notion of such things in my head, that I was apt to look upon them as the forerunners and warnings of God’s judgements; and especially when, after the plague had followed the first, I yet saw another of the like kind, I could not but say God had not yet sufficiently scourged the city.

But I could not at the same time carry these things to the height that others did, knowing, too, that natural causes are assigned by the astronomers for such things, and that their motions and even their revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated, so that they cannot be so perfectly called the forerunners or foretellers, much less the procurers, of such events as pestilence, war, fire, and the like.

Then H.F. encounters the same problem Aeneas does: even when God sends warnings, it’s not clear how we should respond. For instance, he is in a quandary whether he should trust in God and stay in London or trust in God to look after his possessions while he leaves. He sees it one way, his brother another:

It immediately followed in my thoughts, that if it really was from God that I should stay, He was able effectually to preserve me in the midst of all the death and danger that would surround me; and that if I attempted to secure myself by fleeing from my habitation, and acted contrary to these intimations, which I believe to be Divine, it was a kind of flying from God, and that He could cause His justice to overtake me when and where He thought fit.

His brother, who wants him to leave, applies the same argument but concludes from it that he head for the country:

He told me the same thing which I argued for my staying, viz., that I would trust God with my safety and health, was the strongest repulse to my pretensions of losing my trade and my goods; ‘for’, says he, ‘is it not as reasonable that you should trust God with the chance or risk of losing your trade, as that you should stay in so eminent a point of danger, and trust Him with your life?’

H.F. stays and, in the end, gives up trying to figure out the divine meaning of the plague. For some reason, he has survived, and for that he thanks God. He never achieves the clarity that one finds in Sophocles and Virgil, however.

Writing 200 years later, Katherine Anne Porter doesn’t overtly reflect on the greater significance of the 1918 influenza that somehow spares the protagonist but not her lover in the autobiographical novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939). The story, however, emphasizes the arbitrariness of the disease. With 20th century existentialism, we enter into the possibility that there is no transcendent meaning to cataclysm and that life is consequently absurd. This vision is at the heart of Camus’s La Peste (1947).

Yet Camus concedes that we cannot live without vision and concludes that, even if life is indeed meaningless, we still must proceed as though meaning exists. In his case, he finds this meaning in our common humanity, which somehow persists in spite of all that confronts us.

Stephen King comes to a similar conclusion in The Stand (1978). The survivors of a flu strain that has escaped the biological weapons lab divide into two groups, the good and the evil. By having the good guys win, King concludes, like Camus, that humans have more positive in them than negative.

Emily St. John Mandel grapples with existential “meaning of life” issues in Station Eleven (2014), where we watch a traveling group of actors and musicians attempt to find meaning in the face of an influenza that has wiped out most of the earth’s population. In their case, they turn to Art—to music, Shakespeare, and a mysterious, privately published graphic novel. They regard Art as an undefined higher need, critical because “survival is insufficient.” Humans need more than food, shelter, and safety, and in that need is something transcendent.

We see someone constructing higher meaning in Margaret Atwood’s Oryk and Crake. Jimmy is tasked with helping a new race develop a mythology following a pandemic engineered by his friend Crake. A brilliant genetic engineer, Crake plays God by exterminating humanity—most humans, anyway–and creating a new environmentally sensitive race to take their place. Jimmy tells the “Crakers” origin stories—how Crake created them, what his design was—and the stories come to give their lives direction and purpose. In this mythology, Crake’s girlfriend Oryk becomes a sustaining mother goddess.

I mention one other work, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988), where devastating illness threatens to overwhelm the Anishinaabe Indians in 1912. In the account of village elder Nanapush, the tribe and their spirits, already under unrelenting assault by white culture, barely survive:

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die. For those who survived the spotted sicknss from the south, our long fight west to Nadouissioux land where we signed the treaty, and then a wind from the east, bringing exile in a storm of government papers, what descended from the north in 1912 seemed impossible.

…This disease was different from the pox and fever, for it came on slow. The outcome, however, was just as certain. Whole families of your relatives lay ill and helpless in its breath. On the reservation, where we were forced close together, the clans dwindled. Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.

Later, Nanapush records mentions “windigo” as a secondary cause of death, windigo being an evil spirit who cannibalistically possesses human beings:

We had gone half windigo. I learned later that this was common, that there were many of our people who died in this manner, of the invisible sickness. There were those who could not swallow another bite of food because the names of their dead anchored their tongues.

And yet Nanapush and his adopted daughter Fleur, bolstered by their tribe’s protective spirits, keep fighting for survival and never entirely succumb. As in Porter, Camus, and Mandel, we watch in awe at how humans rise to the occasion in even the direst of circumstances.

Whether or not you believe in Zeus, Jupiter, God, the Anishinaabe lake spirit Misshepeshu, or the secular human spirit, they unleash survival powers within humans that can surprise us. There is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in our everyday philosophy, and we can draw strength and courage from that knowledge as we struggle with our current pandemic.

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Church Attendance in Plague Times

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2020
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Spiritual Sunday

Many people go to religious services when they are traumatized, which makes closing the church doors during this crisis particularly unsettling. A couple of weeks ago I wrote an essay critical of millenarians defying prohibitions against large gatherings, but today I use Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) to offer a slightly more sympathetic account.

Not that I agree with these rule-breaking churchgoers. Defoe, however, reminds me how desperate they are.

Journal of the Plague Year is a novel about the great London plague of 1665. To write it, Defoe drew heavily on a journal kept by his uncle Henry Foe (H.F.), whom he sets up as the narrator.

H.F. reports that Londoners flock to churches in the early stages of the plague:

The Government encouraged [the population’s] devotion, and appointed public prayers and days of fasting and humiliation, to make public confession of sin and implore the mercy of God to avert the dreadful judgement which hung over their heads; and it is not to be expressed with what alacrity the people of all persuasions embraced the occasion; how they flocked to the churches and meetings, and they were all so thronged that there was often no coming near, no, not to the very doors of the largest churches. Also there were daily prayers appointed morning and evening at several churches, and days of private praying at other places; at all which the people attended, I say, with an uncommon devotion.

Of course, we now know that such large social gatherings accelerate pandemics, which Londoners themselves quickly learn. Nevertheless, a fair number keep attending services “even in the most dangerous times.” H.F adds,

and though it is true that a great many clergymen did shut up their churches, and fled, as other people did, for the safety of their lives, yet all did not do so. Some ventured to officiate and to keep up the assemblies of the people by constant prayers, and sometimes sermons or brief exhortations to repentance and reformation, and this as long as any would come to hear them.

One can imagine current-day legislators bestowing “essential service” status on these London churches given how people use them, in their final hours, for spiritual solace and psychological relief:

It was indeed a lamentable thing to hear the miserable lamentations of poor dying creatures calling out for ministers to comfort them and pray with them, to counsel them and to direct them, calling out to God for pardon and mercy, and confessing aloud their past sins. It would make the stoutest heart bleed to hear how many warnings were then given by dying penitents to others not to put off and delay their repentance to the day of distress; that such a time of calamity as this was no time for repentance, was no time to call upon God. I wish I could repeat the very sound of those groans and of those exclamations that I heard from some poor dying creatures when in the height of their agonies and distress, and that I could make him that reads this hear, as I imagine I now hear them, for the sound seems still to ring in my ears.

H.F. goes on to describe another stage of the plague where church attendance spikes. When things get really bad, he theorizes, people feel they have little to lose:

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and venturous: they were no more shy of one another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, ‘I do not ask you how you are, or say how I am; it is certain we shall all go; so ’tis no matter who is all sick or who is sound’; and so they ran desperately into any place or any company.

Social distancing is deliberately abandoned at this point:

As it brought the people into public company, so it was surprising how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They inquired no more into whom they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met with, or what condition the people seemed to be in; but, looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and crowded together as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there. Indeed, the zeal which they showed in coming, and the earnestness and affection they showed in their attention to what they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last.

H.F. acknowledges that church attendance goes down somewhat when people realize that individuals may be carrying the disease even when they are asymptomatic (“apparently in good health”). Even in those cases, however, churches don’t close down altogether:

Yet I observed that after people were possessed, as I have said, with the belief, or rather assurance, of the infection being thus carried on by persons apparently in health, the churches and meeting-houses were much thinner of people than at other times before that they used to be. For this is to be said of the people of London, that during the whole time of the pestilence the churches or meetings were never wholly shut up, nor did the people decline coming out to the public worship of God, except only in some parishes when the violence of the distemper was more particularly in that parish at that time, and even then no longer than it continued to be so.

Indeed nothing was more strange than to see with what courage the people went to the public service of God, even at that time when they were afraid to stir out of their own houses upon any other occasion; this, I mean, before the time of desperation, which I have mentioned already. This was a proof of the exceeding populousness of the city at the time of the infection, notwithstanding the great numbers that were gone into the country at the first alarm, and that fled out into the forests and woods when they were further terrified with the extraordinary increase of it. For when we came to see the crowds and throngs of people which appeared on the Sabbath-days at the churches, and especially in those parts of the town where the plague was abated, or where it was not yet come to its height, it was amazing.

H.F. does not judge anyone, either those pastors who flee or those who stay. The former should not be condemned for their lack of fortitude, he says, and the latter should not become boastful and condemn others. None of us knows how he or she would respond in similar circumstances:

A plague is a formidable enemy, and is armed with terrors that every man is not sufficiently fortified to resist or prepared to stand the shock against. It is very certain that a great many of the clergy who were in circumstances to do it withdrew and fled for the safety of their lives; but ’tis true also that a great many of them stayed, and many of them fell in the calamity and in the discharge of their duty.

…[U]pon the whole, an allowance of charity might have been made on both sides, and we should have considered that such a time as this of 1665 is not to be paralleled in history, and that it is not the stoutest courage that will always support men in such cases. I had not said this, but had rather chosen to record the courage and religious zeal of those of both sides, who did hazard themselves for the service of the poor people in their distress, without remembering that any failed in their duty on either side. But the want of temper among us has made the contrary to this necessary: some that stayed not only boasting too much of themselves, but reviling those that fled, branding them with cowardice, deserting their flocks, and acting the part of the hireling, and the like. I recommend it to the charity of all good people to look back and reflect duly upon the terrors of the time, and whoever does so will see that it is not an ordinary strength that could support it. It was not like appearing in the head of an army or charging a body of horse in the field, but it was charging Death itself on his pale horse; to stay was indeed to die, and it could be esteemed nothing less, especially as things appeared at the latter end of August and the beginning of September, and as there was reason to expect them at that time…

Besides, if God gave strength to some more than to others, was it to boast of their ability to abide the stroke, and upbraid those that had not the same gift and support, or ought not they rather to have been humble and thankful if they were rendered more useful than their brethren?

The same charity should be extended to our own healthcare and frontline workers who have chosen to retire from the battle, even as we applaud those who keep working. H.F., incidentally does his own applauding at the end of the narrative:

I think it ought to be recorded to the honour of such men, as well clergy as physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, magistrates, and officers of every kind, as also all useful people who ventured their lives in discharge of their duty, as most certainly all such as stayed did to the last degree; and several of all these kinds did not only venture but lose their lives on that sad occasion.

I was once making a list of all such, I mean of all those professions and employments who thus died, as I call it, in the way of their duty; but it was impossible for a private man to come at a certainty in the particulars. I only remember that there died sixteen clergymen, two aldermen, five physicians, thirteen surgeons, within the city and liberties before the beginning of September. But this being, as I said before, the great crisis and extremity of the infection, it can be no complete list.

Thanks to social media, we have many more options regarding worship, not to mention a much better understanding of epidemics. Nevertheless, Defoe’s novel reminds us how important church is in tough times and why it has been so difficult for legislators to order church doors closed. And for many of the faithful to stay away.

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Trump Is Captain Queeg, Not Bligh

By Robin Bates | Published: April 16, 2020
Bogart as Captain Queeg

Friday

Those of us interested in cultural allusions were struck by a recent Donald Trump Tuesday tweet referencing Mutiny on the Bounty. Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s reflections on the reference alerted me to even better one: Trump as the captain in David Eggers’s comic novel The Captain and the Glory. It so happens that Eggers’s captain is based on Trump, and the parallels are spot on.

Trump’s tweet requires some deciphering:

“Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”

The governors have started setting up multi-state consortiums to address the pandemic. (When it’s working properly, the federal government should be that consortium.) So is Trump thinking of himself as Captain Bligh and perhaps New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as first mate Fletcher Christian? Is he in effect saying, in a patronizing manner, “Ah, isn’t it cute– the governors are declaring their independence when it would be so much easier just to ask me for help?”

That he sees the governors as mutinying is revealing.

Of course, they’ve more or less given up asking for help given how little good it’s done them. As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday,

We have gotten very little help from the federal government…I’ve given up on any promises that have been made. I hope something will get delivered from the federal government, but I don’t expect it anymore.

Unlike Trump, however, Bligh is an accomplished captain, even if he shares his brutishness. When cast adrift, he somehow manages to navigate a lifeboat with 19 passengers 3500 miles to safety. Would that we had someone with these abilities guiding our ship of state.

Or a captain like Brett Crozier, who warned that authorities that Covid-19 was rampaging through his aircraft carrier and was subsequently fired for his truth telling. (One sailor has since died and  580 have tested positive.) (Update: The number is now 655, with six sailors hospitalized.)

A more accurate parallel is Trump as Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny. There we encounter a captain who freezes whenever action gets too hot to handle. At one point, he flees rather than escort low-lying landing craft to their line of departure, at another he freaks out in the face of a typhoon. Our own captain is doing all he can to avoid responsibility and escape reality.

Queeg also falls apart on the witness stand, just as Trump breaks into a rage when asked tough questions by reporters.

Milbank, however, has steered me to a much better parallel in Eggers’s novel.  Here goes:

He nudged the wheel a bit left, and the entire ship listed leftward, which was both frightening and thrilling. He turned the wheel to the right, and the totality of the ship, and its uncountable passengers and their possessions, all were sent rightward. In the cafeteria, where the passengers were eating lunch, a thousand plates and glasses shattered. An elderly man was thrown from his chair, struck his head on the dessert cart and died later that night. High above, the Captain was elated by the riveting drama caused by the surprises of his steering.

This is what it has felt like to have Trump as our president for the past three and a half years. Pray to God that the American public rises up in November and replaces him. Such mutinies have the full support of the Constitution.

Further thought: I just have a new take on Trump’s tweet after seeing new tweets where he is supports people defying governors’ settle-in-place orders: he imagines he is one of the mutineers (“exciting and invigorating”) rather than captain of the ship.

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Postal Service Under Attack (Again)

By Robin Bates | Published: April 15, 2020
Fletcher Martin, Mail Transportation

Thursday

Among our many areas of concern is the threatened demise of the U.S. Postal Service. Because of the pandemic, it is losing billions every month, and apparently Donald Trump wants it to fail, perhaps because that would make mail-in voting impossible. (It would also make Amazon deliveries harder, and Trump has a beef with CEO Jeff Bezos since he also owns the “fake news” Washington Post.)

I am reposting a 2012 essay on Thomas Pynchon’s novel about an underground postal service. At the time I wrote it, the postal service was also under siege. While I can’t imagine that members of Congress with large rural populations would let it die, I didn’t think such states would also reject—and continued rejecting even during a pandemic—Medicaid expansion. Sometimes ideology wins out over the needs of one’s constituents.

I wrote in that essay that bureaucracy is necessary because our society is mindbogglingly complex. Covid-19 should make this clear to everyone as we watch bumbling amateurs try to do the work of seasoned professionals. Meanwhile, libertarians and selfish people who resist settle-in-place orders, social distancing, and required masks will cause more deaths.

One further thought about this reposted essay: I don’t explore why Pynchon chose to write a novel about a crazy conspiracy theory. He may be making the point that, when. a society becomes large, complicated, and impersonal, people use stories to bring it within their sphere of comprehension. Conspiracy theories are compelling stories that flourish amongst populations that feel powerless and/or alienated and that are unable or unwilling to grapple with nuance and complexity. The seeming intricacy of conspiracy theories conceals the basic black and white simplicity of the underlying drama..

Conspiracy theories that arose following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and 9-11 took years to die, if they ever did. Expect to see a wave of coronavirus-related conspiracy theories in the upcoming months and years.

Reprinted from Nov. 27, 2012

On the list of things to worry about that you didn’t know you had to, we must add the U.S. Postal Service. Apparently, the USPS is facing a $5.5 billion default, due in part to the decline of postal mail but much more to Congressional meddling. Certain rightwing elements of the GOP that want the USPS fail are refusing to allow it to adapt and modernize and are demanding (this from the Bush-Cheney years) that it prefund retireee health benefits 75 years into the future–something no other organization is required to do. This brings to mind the greatest literary work I know about postal systems.

Actually, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is the only literary work I know about the postal service. The book features a governmentally licensed postal monopoly (the German mail service Thurm und Taxis) and its ruthless attempts, in the 17th century, to suppress a private mail service (the Tristero). If you know anything about Pynchon, you probably know that he specializes in paranoia. Our current rightwing paranoia about government makes the book particularly relevant.

Here’s how American paranoia enters into the situation. According to Felix Salmon of Reuters, the Postal Service could solve its problems if Congress allowed it to evolve. For instance, post offices could provide banking services, sell fishing, hunting, and other kinds of licenses, and undertake a host of other transactions that the public would find very useful. Unfortunately, there are those on the right that accept as gospel Ronald Reagan’s libertarian article of faith that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” These people are against the USPS becoming more helpful.

One could imagine them fantasizing about the Tristero. In Pynchon’s novel, the Tristero works underground to escape Thurn und Taxis’s attacks. The question is whether they are still at work, secretly undermining today’s USPS monopoly with private mail delivery. A libertarian fantasy would have it that such a private sector organization would be more profitable.

Protagonist Oedipa Maas stumbles across the Tristero when, as executrix of the estate of a former lover, she comes across stamps that may have been used—and maybe are still being used—by the Tristero. As she researches the organization, she starts seeing—or thinks she sees—signs of the Tristero everywhere, especially the muted postal coach horn. (A simple horn, not muted, has been the sign of Thurn and Taxis.) Tristero’s mailboxes, she comes to believe, are metal containers labeled W.A.S.T.E., which stands for We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire. Wherever there is governmental oppression, there is Tristero secretly fighting back.

In our own society, many on the right claim allegiance to a version of the Tristero. They are heroically resisting government attempts to administer vaccines, teach children critical thinking, brainwash them into believing that climate change is real, take God out of Christmas, seize their guns, impose foreign-born presidents, and on and on. Likewise, in Pynchon’s fevered imagination, Oedipa and America in general are being overwhelmed by huge bureaucracies and urban sprawl that seek to crush individuality. Tristero represents an elusive hope that a secret organization exists that will fight back.

Paranoia makes for great fantasy. The more prosaic reality, however, is that we are a very large and complex country that needs complex bureaucracies if everything is to function. These bureaucracies are staffed, for the most part, by competent, well-meaning people who are doing their best. One of their jobs is delivering the mail.

They aren’t doing a bad job of it. They could be doing an even better job if they were not battling fantasists out to prove some ideological point.

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Toni Morrison on Insensitive Employers

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2020
Recent COVID victim Leilani Jordan

Wednesday

The tragic coronavirus death of a Maryland grocery store clerk with cerebral palsy reminds me of a death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which I’m currently teaching remotely to my Composition and Literature course. We see similar levels of corporate insensitivity in both cases.

According to CBS News,

A 27-year-old grocery store clerk from Maryland wanted to keep working through the coronavirus pandemic, even though her job put her at risk. Leilani Jordan had a disability, but she told her mom she wanted to continue working at Giant Food because she wanted to help people, CBS affiliate WUSA-TV reports.

However, Jordan’s last day at work was March 16. Giant Food officials said on March 28, the store learned that Jordan was sick. She was hospitalized with coronavirus symptoms and tragically lost her battle with the disease, Giant Food confirmed to CBS News.

According to Jordan’s mother Zenobia Shepherd, Jordan loved helping the elderly and saw herself as especially needed when other workers stopped showing up. In an interview with MSNBC, Shepherd “said her daughter told her the store was short-staffed and that Giant Food was not providing gloves and that she had to bring her own hand sanitizer to work.” And then there’s this:

Through tears, Shepherd said Giant Food gave her a certificate marking Jordan’s six years of service at the store, as well as her last paycheck. “She would’ve loved to receive this herself. Leilani’s paycheck. I got this paycheck yesterday for twenty dollars,” Shepherd said through tears. “Twenty dollars and sixty four cents. My baby’s gone because of $20.64. You know what using the proper PPE could’ve done for my baby?”

At least Shepherd calls out Giant Food for its insensitivity. In Song of Solomon, young Guitar is haunted by the memory of his mother expressing gratitude to the insensitive sawmill owner after her husband dies in an accident. While exhibiting a shocking disregard for the body, he thinks he can make everything okay by giving the family $40 while his wife bakes divinity for the children:

[Guitar] remembered anew how his mother smiled when the white man handed her the four ten-dollar bills. More than gratitude was showing in her eyes. More than that. Not love, but a willingness to love. Her husband was sliced in half and boxed backward. He’d heard the mill men tell how the two halves, not even fitted together, were placed cut side down, skin side up, in the coffin. Facing each other. Each eye looking deep into its mate. Each nostril inhaling  the breath the other nostril had expelled. The right cheek facing the left. The right elbow crossed over the left elbow. And had had worried then, as a child, that when his father was wakened on Judgment Day, his first sight would not be glory or the magnificent head of God—or even the rainbow. It would be his own other eye.

Even so, his mother had smiled and shown that willingness to love the man who was responsible for dividing his father up throughout eternity. It wasn’t the divinity from the foreman’s wife that made him sick. That came later. It was the fact that instead of life insurance, the sawmill owner gave his mother fifty dollars “to tide you and them kids over”…

In its defense, Giant told CBS that its stores always have available “hand sanitizer and/or cleaning products” (soap?) and that employees “have also always been allowed to wear gloves” (but are mandated to do so only if they work as a food service associate).

I’m dubious that they have done more than the minimum, which if true is also the case with many companies. Frontline workers in the food industry are experiencing high levels of illness, so much so that recently some at McDonald’s and Burger King franchises in southern California went on strike over unsafe conditions.

And then, of course, there’s the Trump administration’s own tardiness in ensuring that the nation’s hospitals have proper PPE. Nor is there a nation-wide testing plan, a prerequisite to reopening the economy. If Guitar’s mother is grateful for $40, will there be Americans grateful to Trump’s efforts to placate the public?

In the novel, Guitar’s anger goes so deep that eventually he becomes a racial avenger, joining a group that murders a white person for every black person killed by white supremacists. Morrison makes clear that such a response is abhorrent and counterproductive, but she understands the outrage.

What’s a healthy way to channel our own anger? Step 1, I suppose, is finding ways to pressure the president and rightwing pundits to abandon magical thinking and engage in serious policy. If they don’t, there will be thousands more Leilani Jordans.

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What Awaits COVID Grafters

By Robin Bates | Published: April 13, 2020
Gustave Doré, the demons hook a grafter in Inferno

Tuesday

When Congress passed the $2 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Plan, it attempted to shield it from graft by declaring that businesses owned by Donald Trump and members of Congress were not eligible. Right on cue, Trump disagreed with this provision of the bill and fired the inspector general responsible for oversight. Don’t expect Senate Republicans to hold him accountable.

Dante, who was well familiar with graft, would have consigned him to Circle 8, Ditch #5. Actually, I’d argue that Trump is eligible for seven of the nine circles, escaping only Circle I (lost souls that cannot pick a side) and Circle VI (heretics). For day’s post, I considered Circle 8, Ditch #3, which is where the “simoniacs” or sellers of ecclesiastic favors and offices are sent. In our secular society, the comparable favors at the moment are medical protective gear and ventilators, which Trump doles out to his friends in red states and withholds from his critics in blue states. But put that aside today and look at how Trump, with his sticky fingers, hopes to get his hooks into the $2 Trillion.

I mix my metaphor because the tortures doled out to grafters involve both stickiness and hooks. But first, an explanatory note on Dante’s system of tortures.

Dante uses the word “contrapasso” for them—which is to say, they are symbolic versions of what the sin is already doing to us. (The punishment fits the crime, as the Lord High Executioner puts it in The Mikado.) In other words, by committing the sin, we have already constructed an internal version of what Dante describes. As Scholar William Franke explains it,

God gives each soul only what it has freely chosen. The punishments are not just externally imposed: they are rather manifestations and intensifications of the state chosen by those who sin. This state flows from each soul’s free interpretation of itself and of the sense of its existence.

The souls are damned eternally because, once one has defined oneself by the sin, one reaches “a point of no return, the point at which their will is no longer capable of reversing itself”:

Through persistent sin, free will is eventually lost…Free indulgence becomes habit and eventually results in loss of the ability not to sin. What we once chose freely becomes addiction, compulsion, necessity: we become it. Eventually we no longer know how to understand ourselves otherwise than in terms of the sin–or more precisely, of the self-interpretation that a certain sin entails. We die morally, and at that point it is too late to change.

Graft for Trump long ago reached a point of no return. There once was a time when he freely chose it, but now it has become “addiction, compulsion, necessity,” defining who he is. Because graft has emptied out his soul, he is already living a hellish existence.

If Trump found himself in Dante’s hell, the poet says that, like the other souls, he would choose of his own accord the circle and ditch that best suits him.

Circle 8, Ditch 5 is unlike anything else in Inferno because it features black humor, with comically named devils wielding grappling hooks. Grafters are thrown into a black, sticky substance like the pitch used to plug the seams of ships:

As in the Venetian arsenal, the winter through
there boils the sticky pitch to caulk the seams
of the sea-battered bottoms…
…
so, but by Art Divine and not by fire,
a viscid pitch boiled in the fosse below
and coated all the bank with gluey mire.
(trans. John Ciardi)

Because graft occurs behind the scenes, Dante at first doesn’t see anything:

I saw the pitch, but I saw nothing in it
except the enormous bubbles of its boiling,
which swelled and sank, like breathing, through all the pit.

It so happens, however, that the pitch is filled with grafters, and they are still playing games. First of all, any who emerge, even for a moment, are hooked by Malacoda, Snatcher, Grizzly, Hellken, Deaddog, Curlybeard, Grafter, Dragontooth, Pigtusk, Catclaw, Cramper or Crazyred, the demons who patrol the shore. Here’s how they treat a new arrival who has just been thrown in:

Down plunged the sinner and sank to reappear
with his backside arched and his face and both his feet
glued to the pitch, almost as if in prayer.

But the Demons under the bridge, who guard that place
and the sinners who are thrown to them, bawled out:
You’re out of bounds here for the Sacred Face:

this is no dip in the Serchio: take your look
and then get down in the pitch. And stay below
unless you want a taste of a grappling hook.”

Then they raked him with more than a hundred hooks
bellowing: “Here you dance below the covers.
Graft all you can there: no one checks your books.”

Grafters, as we have seen with former Trump cohorts like Michael Cohen or Robert Gates, have no compunction about turning in fellow grafters to escape the hooks. After hearing the story of a grafter from Navarre, Dante asks whether there are any Italians in the stew and gets this answer:

“If either of you would like to see and hear
Tuscans or Lombards,” the pale sinner said,
“I can lure them out of hiding if you’ll stand clear

and let me sit here at the edge of the ditch,
and get all these Blacktalons out of sight:
for while they’re here, no one will leave the pitch.

In exchange for myself, I can fish you up as pretty
a mess of souls as you like. I have only to whistle
the way we do when one of us gets free.

A somewhat comic scene follows. The Navarrese does in fact escape back into the pitch, and two of the devils, fighting over who is to blame, tumble in themselves and have to be rescued. Graft’s sticky pitch gets on everyone. Dante, who is feeling somewhat vulnerable himself (his native Florence accused him of graft—probably for political reasons—and sentenced him to death should he return), sneaks off in the turmoil.

 Scholars aren’t sure what to make of Dante’s apparent use of slapstick, but thinking of Trump gives me some insight into it. While a serious matter, Trump’s graft has an entertainment side, whether it involves Trump University, Trump steaks, Trump hotels, Atlantic City casinos, bankruptcy law, or tax dodges. Dismantling oversight of the $2 Trillion while declaring that he himself will oversee the funds draws incredulous guffaws from even the most jaded of Trump watchers. Maybe grafter in Dante’s Italy were seen in comparable ways.

That being said, graft had—and has—grave consequences. It sabotaged the future for Dante’s beloved Florence, and it is wreaking havoc in the United States, with the Trump administration proving to be the most corrupt in our history.  Maybe Dante’s has figured out the best way to depict it: use black comedy, even while you show it to be a soul-destroying practice.  

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Neruda: Let’s All Stop for a Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2020
Pablo Neruda

Monday

As I am writing this on Easter, I want to steer clear, if only for a day, of the continuing COVID-19 horror. Therefore, I turn to an uplifting Pablo Neruda poem where he imagines the entire world pausing. How would it be, he wonders, if, for an “exotic moment,” we all decided to be quiet together.

Perhaps, he speculates, a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves 
     with death.

Perhaps, he says in what could be seen as an Easter message,

the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Tomorrow I’ll return to our sin-filled world and apply Dante’s Inferno to the political misbehavior we are witnessing in the face of the virus. I remind myself, however, that Inferno is set during passion week and culminates on Easter Sunday. After encountering the word (Satan) in the poem’s last canto, Dante begins his climb to Purgatory and Paradise. Today I focus on that upward movement toward hope.

In spring the earth teaches us that what appeared to be dead proves to be alive.

Keeping Quiet

By Pablo Neruda
Trans. Alastair Reid

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves 
     with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
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Shafts of Golden Light

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2020
Fra Angelico, Jesus and Mary Magdalene

Easter Sunday

For Easter I offer up two April poems that work as a before and after. First, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the “slumbering silence” before everything bursts into flower. Then William Carlos William describes that bursting as almost too much to bear. First the breathless anticipation, then the flowering.

In the Rilke poem, the heavens are veiled and dark, the branches bare, and the afternoon long and rainy. Nevertheless, the woods are filled with wonderful smells, a lark is beginning to lift the gray heaven, and the late afternoon features a shaft of golden light that flings the raindrops against the window in a radiant shower. This is the promise of new life.

“Then all is still,” as though the world is readying itself. Think of it as the hour before the Easter dawn.

April
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Again the woods are odorous, the lark 
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray 
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,  
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. 

After long rainy afternoons an hour  
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings  
Them at the windows in a radiant shower,  
And raindrops beat the panes like timorous wings. 

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep 
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;  
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep 
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

There’s little slumbering in Williams’s poem. To be sure, Williams may gesture towards T. S. Eliot’s depiction of April as the cruelest month because it wakes us out of our comfortably frozen torpor, forcing us to feel again. But Williams is ready to take on the challenge of sensation, even though it tires him out. After all, how can we say no to the pink sumac buds, to the “opening hearts of lilac leaves,” to the “many swollen limp poplar tassels”? The pounding of life’s hoofs stays with us “half through the night.”

April
By William Carlos Williams

If you had come away with me
into another state
we had been quiet together.
But there the sun coming up
out of the nothing beyond the lake was
too low in the sky,
there was too great a pushing
against him,
too much of sumac buds, pink
in the head
with the clear gum upon them,
too many opening hearts of lilac leaves,  
too many, too many swollen
limp poplar tassels on the
bare branches!
It was too strong in the air.
I had no rest against that  
springtime!
The pounding of the hoofs on the
raw sods
stayed with me half through the night.
I awoke smiling but tired. 

Although we are living in a time of death, don’t yield to its downward pull. Life may be exhausting but (to borrow from Gerard Manley Hopkins) it is filled with the grandeur of God. We become our best selves when we welcome our inner divinity. Happy Easter.

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For Future Hope, Orwell, Not Dickens

By Robin Bates | Published: April 9, 2020
George Orwell, Charles Dickens

Friday

The COVID-19 outbreak is providing America with a horrific new statistic to further dramatize America’s obscene wealth gap. Apparently African Americans have suffered well over 50% of the fatalities (75% in some localities)–which is to say the poor are experiencing the brunt of the epidemic. The lopsided numbers can be chalked up to unequal health care, a greater likelihood of preexisting conditions, crowded living arrangements, and the need to keep working, often on the front lines of the virus (as janitors, checkout clerks, mass transit drivers, sanitation workers, etc.).  Social distancing is often a luxury available only to those with more money.

The virus may finally confront us with a reckoning that has been a long time coming, one where we may have to turn from Charles Dickens to George Orwell. So, at any rate, argues Janen Ganesh in a Financial Times article (thanks to reader Deepjeet Datta for the alert). Ganesh believes that looking to benevolent businesspeople like Dickens’s Fezziwig is a fool’s game. Only changing the very structure of the system will work.

Before quoting from the article, here’s Scrooge revisiting his old boss in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Past:

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence; and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:

“Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!”

Scrooge’s former self, now grown a young man, came briskly in, accompanied by his fellow-’prentice.

“Dick Wilkins, to be sure!” said Scrooge to the Ghost. “Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear, dear!”

“Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let’s have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say Jack Robinson!”

I think also of Mr. Brownlow, the kind old philanthropist who saves Oliver Twist.

Neither Ganesh nor Orwell is impressed:

If only Murdstone were kinder to David Copperfield. If only all bosses were as nice as Fezziwig. That no one should have such awesome power over others in the first place goes unsaid by Dickens, and presumably unthought. And so his worldview, says Orwell, is “almost exclusively moral.” Dickens wants a “change of spirit rather than a change of structure.” He has no sense that a free market is “wrong as a system.” The French Revolution could have been averted had the Second Estate just “turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge.” And so we have “that recurrent Dickens figure, the Good Rich Man”, whose arbitrary might is used to help out the odd grateful urchin or debtor. What we do not have is the Good Trade Unionist pushing for structural change. What we do not have is the Good Finance Minister redistributing wealth. There is something feudal about Dickens. The rich man in his castle should be nicer to the poor man at his gate, but each is in his rightful station.

Dickens, in fact, is outrightly hostile to trade unionists in Hard Times where, in a strange twist, he lumps them together with the tyrannical factory boss. The good worker Joe, who declines to fight for his rights and whose only reward for a wretched life comes to him in heaven, is shunned by both. Civil Rights activists used to characterize this vision as “pie in the sky by and by.” Ganesh points to the myopia at work:

You need not share Orwell’s ascetic socialism to see his point. And to see that it applies just as much to today’s economy. Some companies are open to any and all options to serve the general good — except higher taxes and regulation. “I feel like I’m at a firefighters’ conference,” said the writer Rutger Bregman, at a Davos event about inequality that did not mention tax. “And no one is allowed to speak about water.”

Orwell, then, is the author we should be looking to:

What Orwell would hate about Stakeholder Capitalism is not just that it might achieve patchier results than the universal state. It is not even that it accords the powerful yet more power — at times, as we are seeing, over life and death. Under-resourced governments counting on private whim for basic things: it is a spectacle that should both warm the heart and utterly chill it. No, what Orwell would resent, I think, is the unearned smugness. The halo of “conscience”, when more systemic answers are available via government. The halo that Dickens still wears. You can see it in the world of philanthropy summits and impact investment funds. The double-anniversary of England’s most famous writers since Shakespeare… serve as a neat contrast of worldviews. Dickens would look at the crisis and shame the corporates who fail to tap into their inner Fezziwig. Orwell would wonder how on earth it is left to their caprice in the first place. The difference matters because, when all this is over, there is likely to be a new social contract. The mystery is whether it will be more Dickensian (in the best sense) or Orwellian (also in the best sense). That is, will it pressure the rich to give more to the commons or will it absolutely oblige them?

Our most ambitious Dickensian philanthropists would be those using their money to fight disease (Bill Gates), the spread of guns (Michael Bloomberg), autocratic systems (George Souros), and climate change (Tom Steyer). But billionaires are even more likely to use their money to rig the system and get special favors. In my state of Tennessee, the rightwing Koch brothers pressured the legislature not to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and the misery resulting from this single act outweighs much of the good done by Bloomberg or Steyer. So I agree with Ganesh that Dickens is of little use here.

Or rather, he provides an important service in dramatizing the plight of the poor. For policy answers, however, politicians who can figure out ways to enact policy based on Orwell’s insights are likely to do far more good.

Further thought: The author who may do the best job at exposing Dickens’s vision, at least artistically, is Bertolt Brecht. In a play like The Good Woman of Setzuan, he shows how a wealthy individual’s good deeds cannot address systemic inequality. In fact, when the press of people’s needs threatens to swamp newly wealthy Shen Teh, a prostitute with a heart of gold, she must invent a ruthless capitalist dark double, Shui Ta, in order to stay afloat. Only a generalized distribution of wealth would address the society’s problems.

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