Which Is Scarier? The Storm or Jesus?

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

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Sunday

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

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

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

Maybe
By Mary Oliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody knows what the soul is.

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

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

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

Will we rise to the occasion?

Maybe.

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Mackie, Trump, and Sadistic Thrills

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

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Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

And in conclusion, as reported by Newsweek:

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

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

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Two Poems to Welcome in Summer

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2024
Monet, Cliff Walk at Pourville (1883)

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Thursday – First Day of Summer

As this is the first day of summer, I’m sharing two delightful summer poems, one celebrating summer moonlight and one summer mornings. In “Moonlight, Summer Moonlight,” Emily Bronte pictures herself lying a bower such as we might encounter in Midsummer Night’s Dream. From that vantage point, she looks up at the moon and at the swaying trees while “the solemn hour of midnight/ Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere”:

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight
By Emily Bronte

Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

Mary Oliver, meanwhile, reminds her heart that “it’s time to come back from the dark” given that it’s a summer morning, with the hills pink and the roses “opening now their soft dresses”:

Summer Morning
Mary Oliver

Heart,
I implore you,
it’s time to come back
from the dark,
it’s morning,
the hills are pink
and the roses
whatever they felt

in the valley of night
are opening now
their soft dresses,
their leaves

are shining.
Why are you laggard?
Sure you have seen this
a thousand times,

which isn’t half enough.
Let the world
have its way with you,
luminous as it is

with mystery
and pain–
graced as it is
with the ordinary.

In life Oliver appears to have been bipolar—at least that’s one way to explain her ecstatic highs and depressed lows—and on this summer morning it sounds like she’s reconnecting with a world she lost sight of when she was wandering “in the valley of night.”

Indeed, she’s offering up a summer morning as a way to negotiate our experiences “with mystery and pain.” She assures readers that if they let such a moment “have its way with you, luminous as it is,” they will find grace even in the ordinary. This goes even for things we have seen “a thousand times.”

So yes, give over your heart to both summer moonlight and summer morning.

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An MLK Poem for Juneteenth

By Robin Bates | Published: June 18, 2024
Poet Margaret Walker

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Wednesday – Juneteenth

In observance of Juneteenth, the now official holiday celebrating the ending of slavery in the United States, here’s a powerful Margaret Walker poem expressing appreciation for Martin Luther King. First, however, I share a strange connection that my hometown of Sewanee, Tennessee has to the events that transpired in Texas back in 1865.

I grew up surrounded by Kirby-Smiths, who were descendants of the last Confederate general to surrender to Union forces. Our obstetrician, our surgeon, my seventh-grade English teacher, and one of my best friends were all descendants. There was even a Kirby-Smith monument in the middle of town which, mercifully, was finally renamed—and the plaque taken down—a few years ago. First branded a traitor and then receiving a pardon, Kirby-Smith came to Sewanee to become a math professor at the newly opened University of the South.

 Kirby-Smith had surrendered in Galveston on June 2, 1865, and it was in Galveston 17 days later where Major General Gordon Granger arrived to inform the slaves that they were all free. Although Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, news traveled slowly in those days. Kirby-Smith had been in fact cut off from the rest of the Confederacy ever since Ulysses S. Grant captured Vicksburg in 1863, which meant that parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and western Louisiana became their own department, known as Kirbysmithdom.

Our featured poet today was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963, in response to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, she wrote the following in which she compares King to the Hebrew prophet Amos. As King was well aware, social justice was Amos’s central mission, and the prophet didn’t hesitate to call out anyone who trampled on the poor. At one point in her poem Walker quotes from his angry words:

You have sold the righteous for silver
And the poor for a pair of shoes.
My God is a mighty avenger
And He shall come with His rod in His hand

Even if you don’t know about Amos, you’ll recognize the line that shows up in King’s speech. It was a line that buoyed oppressed Israelites in Amos’s time and it has buoyed millions ever since it was delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:”Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Here’s the poem:

Amos, 1963
By Margaret Walker

Amos is a Shepherd of suffering sheep;
A pastor preaching in the depths of Alabama
Preaching social justice to the Southland
Preaching to the poor a new gospel of love
With the words of a god and the dreams of a man
Amos is our loving Shepherd of the sheep
Crying out to the stricken land
“You have sold the righteous for silver
And the poor for a pair of shoes.
My God is a mighty avenger
And He shall come with His rod in His hand.”
Preaching to the persecuted and the disinherited millions
Preaching love and justice to the solid southern land
Amos is a Prophet with a vision of brotherly love
With a vision and a dream of the red hills of Georgia
“When Justice shall roll down like water
And righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Amos is our Shepherd standing in the Shadow of our God
Tending his flocks all over the hills of Albany
And the seething streets of Selma and of bitter Birmingham.

King’s speech was delivered almost a century after Texas slaves learned they were free, sad evidence that the arc of history, while it may bend toward justice, bends with excruciating slowness. Walker, however, is heartened to see it bending.

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The Right’s Love Affair with Assault Rifles

By Robin Bates | Published: June 17, 2024
Stallone as Rambo

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Tuesday

“The Supreme Court just effectively legalized machine guns,” read the Vox headline while Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, “Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have decided that more Americans must die in mass shootings because they have a quibble over the word ‘function.’” At issue was a 6-3 ruling by the Court’s rightwing justice overturning a Trump-era ban (!) on bump stocks.

In 2017 a Las Vegas killer carried out America’s deadliest mass shooting in its history (which is really saying something) after using a bump stock to convert his rifle into a super deadly weapon. He killed 58 people and wounded over 500 in mere minutes.

I think of a poem that my father wrote years ago critiquing the NRA. Due to corrupt leadership, the NRA is now only a shadow of its former self, making the poem somewhat dated, but the organization succeeded in its major mission, which was getting the GOP to internalize its fanaticism. It even got the rightwing members of the Supreme Court to sign on.

Referring to a 1986 law banning machine guns, liberal Justice Sonia Sotamayor lambasted her colleagues for using an “artificially narrow definition” to “hamstring[ ] the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” She predicted “deadly consequences.”

I’m reposting my father’s poem, along with my previous commentary. He was familiar with toxic masculinity, having seen instances of it when a soldier in France and Germany during World War II.

Reprinted from Oct. 3, 2017 (slightly amended)

I share today the angriest poem my genial father ever wrote, which takes America’s leading gun organization to task. In “Ballad of the National Rifle Association,” he unloads on the gun group for the ways that it exploits white male anxieties. The poem was “triggered” by a gun ad in Gun World that guaranteed “shooting satisfaction.”

“Ballad” is a complex mixture of fantasies and fears, combining macho displays of supremacy, erotic dreams of manly sexual performance, and various emasculation anxieties. Stanza two is filled with power rape fantasies (“Whang her bang her get your action”).

At one point my father imagines Hollywood scenarios of protecting virginal daughters while cleansing the world of urban “putrefaction.” In this drama, which one sees in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the virginal daughters are the longing for a lost innocence while putrefaction is the black Other that makes anxious whites feel small and fearful. Donald Trump, of course, plays on fears of threatening African Americans (for instance, his description of urban neighborhoods as “hell holes”), and, right on cue, after the Las Vegas shooting Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders mentioned Chicago violence as a reason not to enact gun control measures.

The poem’s deep dive into the psychology of gun fanatics also examines revenge fantasies against chaotic nature and against parents—which is to say, against the fathers who mock their sons’ sensitivity and the mothers whose sensitivity they both long for and hate (because it makes them feel vulnerable). “Pistol Pentheus” is Euripides’s uptight control freak in The Bacchae, who tries to assert his manhood and is torn apart by his Dionysus-crazed mother. There is also an Oedipal reference to shooting the castrating father before he shoots you and adds your “skin” to his collection.

The utopian vision of a new Jerusalem is a power fantasy designed to override anxieties: a militarized America is very good at “winging rockets,” whether at enemies or at the moon. (“It’s natural the boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph,” W. H. Auden wrote about the moon landing.) My father’s ballad was written in the 1990’s but is impressively prescient given how commonplace apocalyptic language has become among many Christian gun-toting enthusiasts.

My father writes the poem in a southern accent. Having spent most of his life in southern Tennessee, he saw up close how susceptible poor Appalachian whites are to NRA fear mongering. The poem appeared in his collection The ZYX of Political Sex (Highlander Research and Education Center, 1999) so expect the language to be explicit.

Incidentally, Lucille Thornburgh, to whom the poem is dedicated, was a longtime union activist.

Ballad of the National Rifle Association
By Scott Bates

In memory of Lucille Thornburgh, dedicated worker for social justice, who liked this poem.

“For your shooting satisfaction . . .”
–from an ad in Gun World

Pistol small arm handgun gun
Trooper Trailsman Frontier Scout
Smith & Wesson Remington
Combat Cobra Knockabout
Browning Sheridan Colt Snap-Out
Single-six and Double-action
TOP PERFORMANCE SUPER CLOUT
Give you shooting satisfaction.

Pistol short arm peter prick
Rod avenger redmeat dong
Johnnie joystick reamer dick
Dummy fixer hicky prong
Swinging sirloin two feet long
Have a similar attraction
Every boy can be King Kong
With a shooting satisfaction.

Pistol-heist her hunt her down
Line her up and ream her right
Ride her home get off your gun
Shag her shoot her up tonight
Jump her hump her out of sight
Whang her bang her get your action
Fill her full of dynamite
For your shooting satisfaction.

Pistol Po-lice save your pity
For the dirty rotten hood
Gun him down in Inner City
Like they do in Hollywood
Save your daughter’s maidenhood
And pulverize the putrefaction
Trash him baby trash him good
For your shooting satisfaction.

Pistol Pentheus git yer maw
Afore she tears you limb from limb
Beat yer pappy to the draw
And incidentally get him
The sonavabitch who wants yer skin
To add it to his rug collection
Blast yer pappy Jungle Jim
Fer yer shootin’ satisfaction.

Pistol Patriot shoot your wad
The world the moon your mouth your brother
Build Jerusalem by God
Winging rockets at each other
Love your country like a mother
Love your enemy dog-fashion
Love your neighbor till he smother
In your shooting satisfaction.

Envoy

Pistol pirate cool tycoon
Do us all a benefaction
Go take a flying fuck at the moon
For our shooting satisfaction!

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Eating Intentionally and Ethically

By Robin Bates | Published: June 16, 2024

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Monday

A former colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Jennifer Cognard-Black, is out with a beautiful new anthology entitled Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically. As the book jacket announces, the essays “seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.”

In her introduction, Jennifer and her collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite say that their selections have been guided by four ethical principles. These are protecting and helping others, seeking to do no harm and to limit pain and suffering, respecting rights of choice and self-determination, and furthering justice, “which includes fairness, equitable distribution, and recognition of both need and contribution.” The essays range “from factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and home and community gardens.”

The book opens with a Naomi Shihab Nye poem that beautifully captures the spirit of the writers. By intermixing food with its natural and cultural setting, “Truth Serum” goes to the heart of ethical eating. When one is intentional and mindful in making one’s food choices, Nye tells us, sorrow lifts in small ways.

Truth Serum

We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture.
Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence,   
popped it right in.
That frog song wanting nothing but echo?   
We used that.
Stirred it widely. Noticed the clouds while stirring.
Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes   
of summer. Dropped in their names.   
Added a mint leaf now and then   
to hearten the broth. Added a note of cheer and worry.   
Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder?   
Perfect. And once we had it,
had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup,   
placing the pan on a back burner for keeping,   
the sorrow lifted in small ways.
We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared.
We washed that pan.

I think of how Salman Rushdie once described literature as a “no bullshit zone,” an essential antidote to the non-stop lying and gaslighting we get from various political figures. Nye has a place for those lies on her stove: she boils them down “in another pan till they disappeared.”

A recipe  that includes night jasmine, frog song, a mint leaf now and then, “a note of cheer and worry,” and an orange butterfly “between the claps of thunder”–and that is watched over by “ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer”–will stand up to a lot of bullshit.

Jennifer’s book aims to do the same.

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Lose Yourself Inside This Soft World

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2024
Vincent Van Gogh, The Haystacks

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Sunday

As we move into the summer holidays, here’s a Mary Oliver poem reminding us that learning doesn’t have to stop at the end of the school year. Her mission in life, as she sees it is

to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.

Oliver talks about herself as a good scholar, taking lessons from nature’s daily presentations. And those presentations don’t have to be exceptional, fearful, dreadful or “very extravagant.” She can learn all she needs from “the ordinary,/ the common, the very drab.”

The poem reminds me of William Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned,” where the poet tells us to turn from our books and go for a walk in the woods. He informs us,

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Oliver’s use of “needle in a haystack” is interesting. Normally, we think that looking for such a needle is a hopeless task, but for Oliver, the haystack is a world made of light, meaning that every day she finds something in it that “kills me with delight.” “What I was born for” she essentially tells us, is to participate in the wonder of God’s creation. Prayers are made out of grass.

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for
– to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

The phrase “what I was born for” may be taken from, and a response to, a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nature-loving poet that I suspect Oliver admires. The phrase memorably shows up in “Spring and Fall” where Hopkins asks Margaret why she is weeping in the presence of autumn’s leaf fall: “Márgarét, áre you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?” He concludes that she is thinking of her eventual death, observing, “It is the blight man was born for,/ It is Margaret you mourn for.”

Rather than focusing on the blight of death, however, Oliver focuses on “the untrimmable light of the world.” As she sees it, death won’t trim life’s candle because the world is bigger than any individual. Nor did Oliver ever have the experience that Hopkins predicts for Margaret: “Ah!  ás the heart grows older/ It will come to such sights colder.” Up to the very end, Oliver described herself as “a bride married to amazement,” a phrase that appears in “When Death Comes”:

 When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

And the conclusion:

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

There’s no doubt that Oliver would endorse an old rabbinical saying: “There’s only one question God will ask us when we meet him after death: ‘Did you enjoy my creation?’” As she advises in “In Blackwater Wood,”

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the times come to let it
go,
to let it go.

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The GOP Has Learned to Love Big Brother

By Robin Bates | Published: June 13, 2024
John Hurt as Winston Smith in 1984

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Friday

In a move that MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace compared to an arsonist returning to the scene of the crime, Donald Trump yesterday journeyed to Washington to address GOP Congress members for the first time since January 6. On that day, many of those now applauding Trump had cowered behind barricaded doors after he sent his supporters rampaging through the Capitol. As Wallace noted, while arsonists may enjoy revisiting their handiwork, normally the victims don’t themselves decide to celebrate the man who set their house on fire.

The GOP’s 180-degree turn—from condemning the attack to supporting Trump as he calls the insurrectionists “warriors” and promises to pardon them—recalls Winston Smith’s turnaround at the end of 1984. It’s always worth revisiting that passage because it reveals the lengths to which people will go to sell out their honor, integrity, dignity and core principles.

After relentless pressure from Big Brother, Winston finally surrenders, and his reward is a profound sense of relief. Orwell invokes Stalin’s notorious show trials, some of which ended with his victims embracing their own deaths, as he writes that Winston

was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

Trump has provided GOP lawmakers with absolution for their previous sin of doubting him (although he will needle them about it from time to time), and for this they are profoundly grateful. The more they fought him, the more his current forgiveness feels like a gift. Whether we call this cult behavior or Stockholm Syndrome or brainwashing, we are witnessing it daily. The novel concludes with Winston drinking gin in a café and gazing up adoringly at Big Brother’s enormous face:

Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Winston at least has an excuse: either he embraces his authoritarian leader or rats chew off his face. What excuse for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Nancy Mace, Mitch McConnell, and all those others who were at the Capitol that day?

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O Is for Dirty Oil Men

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2024

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Thursday

Today is my father’s birthday—he died 11 years ago at 90—so in his honor I’m sharing one of his poems. Looking back, I’m so glad that he lived long enough to see the election of Barack Obama and somewhat relieved that he didn’t witness the rise of Donald Trump. He would have had poems for the occasion, however, including today’s poem on oil barons.

The poem appeared in his 1982 collection ABC of Radical Ecology, representing (you guessed it) the letter O. Even though we’re hearing of wonderful developments in the world of renewables—there are apparently days in California now when solar and wind-powered generators produce all the energy needed and then some—Big Oil has not given up the fight. If we increasingly hear about billionaires flocking to Trump, it’s because he making offers like the following:

Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1 billion for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, according to a bombshell new report.

According to the Washington Post, the former US president made his jaw-dropping pitch, which the paper described as “remarkably blunt and transactional,” at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home and club.

In front of more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, he promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution. He would also overturn the Biden administration’s decision in January to pause new natural gas export permits which have been denounced as “climate bombs”.

A follow-up story calculated that Trump’s deal would save the oil industry $110 billion in tax breaks.

This news comes a year after we learned that, as long ago as 1959, oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels was contributing to climate change and yet kept it secret. .

OZ in my father’s poem is ozone, and it’s worth noting that the international effort to protect and rebuild the ozone layer has been one of environmentalism’s more significant victories. (There’s still some ozone depletion but nothing like what we were suffering in the 1980s when this poem was written.) If the world accomplished this, maybe there’s hope yet.

Unless, that is, Trump and the dirty oil men get their way.

O Is a Dirty Oil Man

O look out for the
Oil Barons the Omnipotent
Outrageous and Obnoxious
Owners of the O so delicate O-
Zone

Officious
Oligarchs of Order and
Ordure they would
Obliterate
OZ
for an Ocean of
BUZZ
business busyness bossiness booziness

Olympian
Overbearing
Opinionated and
Omniversou they are also
Obsolte
(but they don’t know it yet)

O look out
for the
Oleaginous
Oil-powerful
(they think)

Lizards of Ooze

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