Will UK One Day “Rue” Brexit?

By Robin Bates | Published: December 18, 2019
A bank of rue

Thursday

I’ve been so taken up with the Trump impeachment hearings that I haven’t acknowledged the sad news coming out of Britain. With Boris Johnson’s mandate election dashing the Remainers’ dream of a second referendum, Brexit now appears a certainty. And a hard Brexit at that.

I fear that, by failing to heed John Donne’s warning that “no man is an island,” the U.K. will face a tough reckoning. In Donne’s famous meditation, the major image involves a plague victim assuming the death bells he’s hearing are ringing for someone else. Given the rate at which people are dying, however, there’s a chance he’s hearing bells tolling his own death. Thus the famous conclusion: “[N]ever send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Donne’s point is that, whether it is we or someone else, we are all so interconnected that it doesn’t matter who is dying. “[E]very man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” Donne writes, and then adds, “if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were.” England is more than a clod but still considerably smaller than the entirety of the continent. Because we are all “involved in mankind,” we all share the same fate.

Brexiteers fantasize that they can once again, if not rule the waves, at least control their own imports and exports and who gets in. No more Brussels bureaucrats to worry about. The sad truth, however, is that we live in an interconnected world and England will not regain the power it imagines.

For one thing, it will no longer speak with the force of Europe. Currently it sings with the backing of a great organ and a full choir. After Brexit, despite its glorious history, it will discover its voice sounds reedy and thin.

In April I shared a poem appearing in the Irish Times lamenting Brexit. I republish a slightly adapted version of that post again today.  

Reprinted from April 1, 2019

When The Irish Times interviewed several Irish authors about Brexit, one of them responded with a lyric. In dark and confusing times, poetry steps up.

It makes sense that Irish authors would weigh in since the Emerald Isle, especially Northern Ireland, has more at stake than almost anyone else. The border between the two Irelands was essentially erased when the UK (which includes Northern Ireland) became part of the European Union, which in turn helped bring an end to the Irish troubles.

If Britain pulls out, some are predicting renewed violence in the northern counties. Brexiteers offer no viable solutions.

Ian Duhig writes about a French street named after Helen Joanne Cox (a.k.a. Jo Cox), the Labor Member of Parliament who was assassinated by a Brexit supporter. Duhig plays with the French word for street (“rue”), concluding with an allusion to Irish author Jonathan Swift, famous for his savage indignation:

Rue
Rue Jo Cox, Députée Britannique,
the street sign in Burgundy reads:
Assassinée pour ses convictions.

No British road is named after her,
I found on returning home, for fear
it might have proved controversial.

I remembered in Shakespeare rue
even for ruth, called ‘herb of grace’
because it was used in exorcisms,

by the angel to clean Adam’s eyes
and Gulliver back home for his nose
against the smell of his countrymen.

To identify the literary allusions, in Richard II the royal gardener has the thankless task of telling the queen her husband has been overthrown. Duhig identifies with the gardener’s sadness and understands why he resolves to plant a bank of rue.

“Rue” reminds this gardener of “ruth,” defined by Webster’s as a feeling of pity, distress or grief. “Herb of grace” refers to the belief that rue could keep evil spirits at bay. Duhig wishes his poem would function as a bank of rue. Here’s Shakespeare:


Here did she fall a tear; here in this place
I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,
In the remembrance of a weeping queen.

In Paradise Lost, meanwhile, rue is one of the herbs that the Archangel Michael uses to clear Adam’s eyesight so that he will see the future. Adam has been blinded by the seductive promises of the forbidden fruit and requires rue as an antidote:

Michael from Adam’s eyes the film removed
Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight
Had bred; then purged with euphrasie and rue
The visual Nerve, for he had much to see…

Duhig here wishes that his poem would clear the eyesight of deluded Britons.

The allusion to Swift’s Gulliver sharpens his attack on those who engineered the Brexit vote. Having encountered the perfect Houyhnhnms, Gulliver stuffs his nose with rue because he can’t stand the contrasting smell of his fellow human beings:

I found my terror gradually lessened, but my hatred and contempt seemed to increase.  I was at last bold enough to walk the street in his company, but kept my nose well stopped with rue, or sometimes with tobacco.

And later:

 During the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room.

Duhig uses the allusion to vent his own disgust.

In sum, Duhig uses Shakespeare to express his sadness that something precious has died, Swift to signal that the Brexiteers stink to high heaven, and Milton to predict a dark future. Regarding the allusion to Paradise Lost, the first future event Adam sees is Cain’s murder of Abel. The Brexiteers may dream of the power promised by the snake, but it doesn’t take an archangel to expose this as no more than a groundless fantasy.

In a further note, Duhig notes one other definition of rue:

 Of course, rue has another common meaning, regret: whatever the risk to post-Brexit shortages in food and medicine, generations of regret are being stockpiled now.

One of the few silver linings is that the UK’s travails are causing other EU members to appreciate what they have. That will be of scant comfort to suffering Brits, however.

Previous posts on Brexit

Ishiguro Predicted Brexit, Trump

Brexit or Never Let Me Go

Brexit Caused by Stiff-Necked Pride

Kipling has the Brexiteers’ Number

With Brexit, UK Betrayed the Spirit of Chaucer https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/with-brexit-uk-betrayed-spirit-of-chaucer/


Donne vs. Brexit: No Nation Is an Island https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/donne-vs-brexit-no-nation-is-an-island/

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In the Face of Trump, Be Aeneas Strong

By Robin Bates | Published: December 17, 2019
Federico Barocci, Aeneas Flees Burning Troy (1598)

Wednesday

Yesterday, after getting our stove pipe cleaned (note to self: write blog post about Blake’s chimney sweep), I lit a fire, watched snow flurries through the window, made myself a hot buttered rum, and opened The Aeneid. Next semester I’ll be teaching Virgil’s epic in Sewanee’s “Representative Masterpieces” class (fondly known as RepMas), and I have to get ready.

As I read, I came across a passage that speaks to the difference between following the mob and being a statesperson. It’s an epic simile describing how Poseidon commands the winds that have been battering Aeneas’s ships to cease. These winds, incidentally, are the work of the vengeful Juno, who has bribed the guardian of the winds to unleash them. Juno’s desire to sabotage Aeneas’s great mission is not unlike Trump desire to disrupt a fair and free election.

The difference between those throwing rocks and the he who stops them is the difference between those standing up for the Constitution and those capitulating to a fear of Trump tweets and Facebook denunciations. Various Democrats in Trump-leaning districts have decided that Trump’s extortion efforts outweigh concerns about their political futures and will be voting to hold him accountable. Now we need Republicans to do the same:

                        Just as, all too often,
 some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising
 the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion,
 rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms
 but then, if they chance to see a man among them,
 one whose devotion and public service 
           lend him weight [pietate gravem],
 they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as
 he rules their furor with his words and calms 
           their passion. (Trans. Robert Fagles)

In the House impeachment hearings, we saw pietate gravem demonstrated by ambassadors and State Department officials. Virgil may be overly optimistic, however, in his belief that a devout public servant can get the Jim Jordans of the world to stand stock-still with their ears alert and their passions calmed.

We are at a critical juncture in our nation’s history. Regardless of how the firebrands behave, we must stand strong.

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Trump Love: I Lie with Him and He with Me

By Robin Bates | Published: December 16, 2019
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Ask Me No More

Tuesday

Yesterday I analyzed the “strange love” that the GOP has for Donald Trump. Continuing that line of thought, today I share a couple of legendary love poems, one that describes a state of denial, the other a crazed and irrational affection. Trump Love has elements of both.

Denial is definitely at work as the GOP goes to unprecedented lengths to defend a man caught red-handed in acts of extortion, bribery, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice and of Congress. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, written to a mysterious dark lady, the lover is so smitten that he pretends not to know she has a “false-speaking tongue.” “When my love swears that she is made of truth,” he says, “I do believe her, though I know she lies.”

I’ve adapted Sonnet 138 to apply to Trump worship. As you can see if you compare it to the original, I’ve kept four of the lines, including the final two. The devastating pun that runs through the sonnet captures how Trump and the GOP have become inseparable bedfellows. One partner calls the shots while the other allows him/herself to be abused:

Sonnet 138 (adapted)

When my love swears the call was perfect,
I do believe him, though I know he lies,
That he might think that I am loyal,
Gullible as to how he bends the truth.
Thus vainly thinking that he’s on my side,
Though knowing that betrayal is never far:
Simply I credit his false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
Why doesn’t he say he cares but for himself?
Why not admit that I am just the same?
Oh, politics’ best habit is in seeming trust
And hacks love not to have the truth revealed.
     Therefore I lie with him and he with me,
      And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Once one’s mind starts running in this direction, one no longer needs to adapt. Sonnet 147 can be applied with no changes since Trump love “is a fever” and his followers’ thoughts “as madmen’s are.” If forced to tell the truth, like Shakespeare’s lover they might acknowledge, “My reason…hath left me.” They might even say secretly (and perhaps one day will publicly),

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
 Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

At the moment, however, Trump supporters seem “past cure” and “frantic-mad with evermore unrest.” They indulge their Trump obsession to please their “uncertain sickly appetite,” only to discover that, in so doing, they but “preserve the ill.”

The physician Reason has long since thrown up his hands and left the building.

Sonnet 147

My love is as
a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

     For I have sworn thee fair, and thought
thee bright,

     Who art as black as hell, as dark as
night.

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Strange Love: How the GOP Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Donald Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: December 15, 2019
Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove

Wednesday

I turn to film rather than literature today because I think that Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant black comedy has something to teach us about the GOP’s wholesale capitulation to the most corrupt and mendacious president in the country’s history. One can either spend all one’s energies worrying about how to defend Trump’s actions or one can simply embrace the whole package.

With regard to the president’s attempts at bribery and extortion, it doesn’t matter that the Ukraine phone call indicts the president, that his chief of staff admits he did it, that his E.U. ambassador says he did it, that various witnesses heard him do it, and that the president all but confirmed he did it by publicly calling, on the White House lawn, for Ukraine and for China as well to investigate Biden. (And let’s not forgot that he asked Russia to release hacked e-mails during the 2016 campaign, which they did.) Worried? Just embrace the Trumpian playbook and contend that none of this happened. It’s so much easier that way.

The Washington Post editorial page, which bends over backward to be balanced in such instances, is unsparing in its criticism:

Democrats arguing for the president’s impeachment repeatedly cited evidence that Mr. Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting with its president on an announcement by Ukraine that it would investigate former vice president Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory about the 2016 U.S. election. Most Republicans responded with the diversions they have offered since the impeachment process began: spurious complaints about the process, coupled with claims that Democrats were interested only in reversing the results of the 2016 election.

Remarkably, not one GOP member of the Judiciary Committee was ready to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with Mr. Trump’s demand that a foreign government pursue false charges against one of his most likely Democratic opponents in the 2020 election. They could have followed the example of the several Republican legislators who have said Mr. Trump’s actions were improper but not impeachable. Instead, they offered a display of blind fealty, portraying Mr. Trump as a victim of Democratic persecution while ignoring or misrepresenting the evidence against him.

In Dr. Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the United States and the Soviet Union are engaged in complicated diplomacy to keep from blowing each other up.  Such diplomacy, in the minds of certain rabid military officers, is for wimps, which is how they regard President Merkin Muffley.   Better to embrace wholesale destruction, especially if you can wipe out the Soviet Union while losing “no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.” General Jack Ripper takes matters into his own hands and launches an attack, not knowing that the USSR has invented a doomsday machine that will destroy the entire world.

But choosing to attack rather than negotiate is not the only way to stop worrying. Why not just embrace the apocalypse as one final joy ride, blowing everything up with no worry for the future? This, of course, is how bombardier pilot Major Kong goes out, riding a nuclear warhead as though it’s a bronco. Kubrick gives us a masturbation image, with King slapping his cowboy hat at the projectile between in legs in anticipation of the ultimate explosion. All of his worries are about to end.

I’m talking about politics here, but why not extend this to climate change as well? Devour fossil fuels as though there’s no tomorrow. National Parks? Grab all you can while the getting is good. Tax breaks for the rich? Let future generations worry about the deficit. Government regulations: Gut them and see how much you can get away with. Our reality television president is giving his fans the ultimate high.

Atlantic recently profiled Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson and found a Strangelovian shift underway. Years ago, Carlson ran a somewhat balanced program on National Public Television, but no longer. “I’ve made a complete break mentally with the world I used to live in,” Carlson says, and one can see the effect. It’s much easier to say that America is being overrun by dirty immigrants (as Carlson does in the interview) than to work out a nuanced immigration policy. As the article’s author points out, there is no moral self-reflection in Carlson’s world:

But when it comes to the Tucker Carlson of the Trump era, don’t expect any sort of personal reckoning in the near future. “It’s very hard when you’re succeeding to see your own flaws. It’s very hard,” he said. “Because everything about the experience reinforces what you’re doing.”

 Yes, that’s what life looks like when you abandon all moral principles and give yourself over to Trumpism. You stop worrying.

Or as George Orwell would put it, you learn to love Big Brother.

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Let the Evening Come

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2019
Renoir, Lisa Sewing

Spiritual Sunday – Third Sunday of Advent

Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come” beautifully captures the spirit of Advent. Dark though the world may be, Jesus has promised  that “God does not leave us.” Dwelling in that assurance transforms the evening from terror into tranquility.

Instead of dreading the oncoming darkness, focus on those small moments that enrich a life. Think of evening as the time when the dew collects on the hoe after a day’s work and when “a woman takes up her needles and her yarn.”

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
 shine through chinks in the barn, moving
 up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
 as a woman takes up her needles
 and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
 in long grass. Let the stars appear
 and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
 Let the wind die down. Let the shed
 go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
 in the oats, to air in the lung
 let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
 be afraid. God does not leave us
 comfortless, so let evening come.

 Previous Advent Posts

Leslie Marmon Silko: A Pueblo Novel with an Advent Message
Allan Boesak: Let Us Enter Advent in Hope
Donald Hall: Advent and Horror at the Voice
Jennifer Michael: He Comes to Shatter Expectations
Thomas Hardy: At Once a Voice Arose
Robert Frost: Walking Down the Saddest City Lane
Herman Melville: Like the Crocus Budding in the Snow
Lucille Clifton: John the Baptist: His Mouth Be True as Time
Catherine Alder: The Twisted Fingers Letting Go
Madeleine l’Engle: The Stable Is Our Heart
David Whyte: The New Moon, A Prayer Opening to Faith
Madeleine L’Engle: Climate Hope Shines in Dark Times
Cecil Frances Alexander: Once in Royal David’s City
W. H. Auden: And the Light Shineth in the Darkness
Scott Bates: The Animals Are Trying to Warn Us
Christina Rossetti: Weeping We Hold Him Fast Tonight
Rowan Williams: He Will Come Like Crying in the Night
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Rest between Two Notes
Mark Jarman: The Intrusion of an Overwhelming Joy
Madeleine L’Engle: The Irrational Decision to Have Jesus

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Lit and Life: My Intellectual Trajectory

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2019
Matthias Stom, Young Man Reading by Candlelight

Friday

In yesterday’s post, I was startled to find myself repeating ideas from my 1973 senior thesis. I take the occasion of today’s post to reflect upon what has changed since then and what has remained constant.

Yesterday I wrote that, although certain popular books (like Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique) may have had a more immediate impact on American history, literary classics have had a more profound effect. Figures like Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson and the other great masters were changing, not local topics, but the way reality itself is seen.

As a Carleton College history major 46 years ago, I set out to determine the impact of the French Enlightenment upon the French Revolution. (Unlike graduate students, college students aren’t discouraged from tackling the big questions.) I was pushing back against a French historian who argued that the penny pamphlets appearing on the Paris streets were more responsible for the storming of the Bastille and the overthrow of the monarchy than were the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot.

I argued then, as I argued yesterday, that there’s a difference between changing local circumstance and changing reality itself. After Diderot’s Letter on the Blind and Rousseau’s Discourse upon Inequality, people no longer regarded institutions like the monarchy as fixed and immutable. Once such a view took hold, pamphlets calling for people to march on the royal palace took on a new resonance.

I was drawn to explore such subjects because I believed my lifelong passion for great literature was related to my passion for social justice. (My family was involved in my grade school’s desegregation efforts.)  Both seemed high-minded affairs, and my scholarship and my teaching have explored whether literature and history can be joined. Although a history major at Carleton, in my senior thesis I speculated that a work’s aesthetic aspects might play a critical historical role. I switched to English in graduate school to determine whether that was the case.

At Emory University I discovered reception theory, where focus shifted from text to reader and the reader’s historical context. As I noted yesterday, Hans Robert Jauss argued that great works change an era’s horizons of expectations. In one of my first grad school essays, I claimed that Dickens deliberately challenged his age’s horizon in Martin Chuzzlewit by placing his villain within the domestic hearth, a shock given that Dickens depicts the hearth as sacred in the novels that came before (Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Nicholas Nickleby). By upsetting readers, Dickens prompted them to confront how laissez faire capitalism was desecrating all that they held dear. Although initially a disappointment, by the end of Dickens’s life Martin Chuzzlewit was one of his most popular works.

Over the years I have looked at different ways that literature has impacted audiences. In the 1970s, feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, and queer theory helped me see how literature has political dimensions. In the 1980s, I turned from political movements to individuals and focused on literature’s psychological aspects. I also focused more on individual lives, especially the lives of my students, and used psychology and sociology to understand how literature was impacting them—and how they in turn could use literature to better their lives.

In the 1990s, when I became an Episcopalian, I looked at how literature helps connect us with our spiritual longings. In the 21st century, with the election of Barack Obama, I rediscovered political hope and once again examined how literature can support our better angels. More recently, with the election of Donald Trump, I am looking to see how literature can help us resist the other angels.

Even as I have explored, over and over, the interaction of literature and history, I have simultaneously regarded literature as its own self-contained world, a refuge into which one can crawl to escape the world. Literature that is transparently didactic is, for me, not real literature. (“The Poet, he nothing affirms,” Sir Philip Sidney tells us.) There’s a tension between literature helping us engage with the world and literature offering us a retreat from the world. I’ve always felt pulled in two directions.

So there you have the mindset that created Better Living through Beowulf. Thanks to the blog form, I don’t have to arrive at a grand summation. I’ll stop from time to time, as I’m stopping today, to reflect on where I am. Otherwise, it’s just a daily plunge into the maelstrom of literature and life.

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13 Books That (Kind of) Changed America

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2019
Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits

Thursday

I’ve been reading Jay Parini’s Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America (2008), recommended by friend and colleague John Gatta. While it’s not living up to my expectations, it has me reflecting on how literature changes lives.

I should have known I was in for a disappointment when I read the following passage:

This was never meant to be a list of the “greatest” American books: not The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, or The Education of Henry Adams Although I love poetry, I knew that not even Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, let alone Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop, had noticeably “changed” America in any significant way (except among that tiny group who actually read poetry). I was looking for books that played a role in shaping the nation’s idea of itself or that consolidated and defined a major trend. Ideally, I wanted books that shifted consciousness in some public fashion, however subtly, or opened fresh possibilities for the ways Americans lived their lives.

With such criteria–note his use of “public fashion”–Parini has necessarily limited himself to expository, didactic and how-to works, such as Of Plymouth Plantation, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Federalist Papers, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (an archetypal immigrant memoir),W.E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Dr. Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Plymouth Plantation helped established the American myth, Franklin the American character, Federalist Papers our enlightenment republic, Lewis and Clark America’s sense of manifest destiny, Antin the immigrant dream, and Du Bois the African American challenge. Dr. Spock, meanwhile, changed how parents raised their children, Carnegie how (mostly) men attacked the workplace, and Friedan how women came to see their role as housewives.

The literature Parini mentions is mostly associated with causes and movements: Thoreau’s Walden is a touchstone work for the environmental movement while Kerouac’s On the Road inspired the Beats and then the 1960s Counter-Culture movement. About Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Parini quotes Ann Douglas, who says that it “is a great book, not because it is a great novel, but because it is a great revival sermon, aimed directly at the conversion of its hearers.”

It makes sense, then, that Parini is weakest when it comes to the least didactic literary work on his list. Huckleberry Finn, he says, showed authors the artistic possibilities of the American vernacular, gets us to think about what we mean by freedom, and provides us a model for interracial friendship. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t set the novel above other American literary masterpieces, which have wielded their own influence and encourage comparable reflection.

Incidentally, given Parini’s view of change, I’m astounded at the omission of one work, not only from his top 13 but also from the 100 other works he includes in his epilogue: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. As a novel, it’s far inferior even to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it has certainly has had an outsized impact on our politics.

One could respond to Parini with Percy Shelley’s observation (in Defence of Poetry) about the difference between true poets and mere reasoners. While the reasoners can impact surface changes, Shelley writes that

it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. 

Such poets, Shelley argues, so deeply changed the way we see the world that the two greatest advances in history can be traced back to their visions: the ending of slavery and the liberation of women.

Reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss makes a distinction between great literature and culinary literature. The first changes our “horizon of expectations” whereas the latter leaves our expectations essentially undisturbed. I would argue that the authors Parini (against his wishes) omits from Thirteen Books That Changed America did in fact change the horizon within which the Spocks, Carnegies, Friedans, etc. operated. Their horizons were shaped by Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Eliot, and others. To cite just one instance, Friedan came trailing clouds of Kate Chopin, Adrienne Rich and others. The greatest literature changes the paradigm itself, lesser literature ferrets out new possibilities within that changed paradigm.

Shelley wrote his Defence in response to the utilitarians of his day, who regarded poetry as nice but peripheral. Parini all but concedes such a view with his view of change.

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How Trump’s GOP Enforces Loyalty

By Robin Bates | Published: December 10, 2019

Wednesday

In 1984 I was on a faculty panel discussing George Orwell’s famous novel. At the time I was critical, describing it as a paranoid scream and confidently asserting that it had little relevance for those of us living in liberal democratic societies. I assumed that our system of checks and balances and our commitment to the rule of law would protect us from Big Brother.

In short, I underestimated Orwell.

Mother Jones’s David Corn is the latest to turn to 1984 to describe recent political developments. His target is the Attorney General for overriding his own Inspector General:

Following the release of the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the origins and management of the Trump-Russia investigation, Attorney General William Barr went into full Oceania  war-is-peace mode to erase truth in order to protect and soothe his dear leader, Donald Trump. Moments after the report appeared—it concludes the FBI had been right to open an investigation of interactions between Trump associates and Russia in 2016, as Moscow was attacking the US election to help Trump win the White House—Barr challenged the findings. He declared that he knew better than the IG and that the FBI had launched the probe “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.” Barr noted that his own hand-picked federal prosecutor, John Durham, would be conducting a separate review and have the final word. And the next day, Barr continued his brazen campaign of disinformation. In an interview with NBC News, he called the FBI investigation “completely baseless.” Barr depicted the probe as a “danger” to civil liberties and the American political system. He was twisting up into down.

Barr shows how our problems extend beyond Trump to large swathes of the Republican Party. In their readiness to repeat Trump’s lies rather than acknowledge what’s really happening, they remind me of the protagonist of the novel that most influenced 1984: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

Koestler was a German communist who, disillusioned by Stalin, left the party in 1938. The 1940 novel records the final days of Rubashov, a one-time revolutionary hero who is imprisoned by No. 1’s secret police for questioning party orders. No. 1, like Big Brother, is modeled on Stalin.

Like Rubashov, those Republicans guilty of independent thought pay a price. Rep. Justin Amash, although a reliable rightwing vote, was drummed out of the party after concluding from the Mueller Report that Trump had engaged in impeachable conduct. How today’s GOP enforces party discipline is brilliantly laid out in a Tim Alberta Politico article.

It so happens that Rubashov himself once did the bidding of the party bosses. In one painful scene, he informs 19-year-old Richard that he will be expelled because he has not been repeating the Party’s empty talking points. Richard, who speaks with a stutter, explains the situation on the ground made it necessary. For Rubashov, however, loyalty trumps everything:

“But you did not distribute our material; it is not even mentioned in your report. Instead, you circulated the material made by yourselves—without the control or approval of the Party.”

“B-but we had to,” Richard brought out with a great effort…”The t-tone of your propaganda material was wrong…”

After an interruption, the conversation continues:

 “We must come to a conclusion,” said Rubashov. “If I understand you rightly, you said that you purposely did not distribute our material because you did not agree with its contents. But neither did we agree with the contents of your leaflets. You will understand, comrade, that certain consequences must come of that.”

Richard turned his reddened eyes towards him. Then he lowered his head. “You know yourself that the material you sent was full of nonsense,” he said in a flat voice. He had suddenly stopped stammering.

“Of that I know nothing,” said Rubashov drily.

Their conversation ends badly:


“Comrade— b-but you couldn’t d-denounce me, comrade. . .,” said Richard…[H]e had caught the sleeve of Rubashov’ s overcoat and was talking straight down into his face; Rubashov felt his breath and a slight dampness sprayed on to his forehead.

“I am not an enemy of the Party,” said Richard. “You c-can’t throw me to the wolves, c-comrade. . . .”

That, in fact, is what Rubashov does, turning him over to the Secret Police.

Many Republicans know their talking points are nonsense, especially that Ukraine rather than Russia attacked our 2016 election. They also know they will be thrown to the wolves if they deviate from the party line. Therefore they either lie openly or lie in their silence acquiescence.

As the book opens, Rubashov finds himself in Richard’s place, awaiting execution, and an old Czarist army officer in the adjoining cell tells him it serves him right. We could say that it also serves former Trump loyalists like Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn right that they are in prison or headed for it. Unfortunately, as in the novel, No. 1 remains in power and untouched.

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Trump as Sadist

By Robin Bates | Published: December 9, 2019
The Marquis de Sade

Tuesday

As the Trump Administration puts forth measures that will throw as many as 750,000 people off the food stamp rolls, I am tempted to rerun an old post quoting Scrooge on workhouses and the poor. Certainly ’tis the season for it. Political scientist John Stoehr, however, has me thinking about such proposals in a different way.

Trump isn’t advocating cuts because he is miser pinching pennies, Stoehr argues. He’s doing so because he’s a sadist.

Raising the issue of sadism calls for an examination of the novels of the Marquis de Sade, which are still unsurpassed in their articulation of this pathology. Before turning to them, let’s first look at what Stoehr has to say.

His piece appeared last August when we were learning about new horrors (which continue unabated) being inflicted on immigrants seeking asylum. Most shocking, of course, is children being separated from their parents, not to mention the several who have died in custody. The suffering of children strikes us particularly hard because they don’t deserve it. Nor do their parents, I would add, but with children the cruelty stands out.

While Trump and his defenders claim such cruelty is necessary if immigrants are to be discouraged from coming to America, Stoehr observes that Trumpists offer such a rationale only because they can’t admit the real reason. In actuality, they believe these people deserve to be punished. The point is not a successful policy initiative but the pain itself:

The thing about a sadist president is that he doesn’t care if his sadist policies don’t work. The other thing is that he can’t tell us that he doesn’t care if they don’t work. He doesn’t care if they don’t work, because “working” doesn’t matter.

Policies leading to appreciable outcomes are of no consequence. He can’t tell us that he doesn’t care if his sadist policies don’t work because sadism for its own sake is unthinkable to us.

Examining a number of the immigration policies, Stoehr notes they have little to do with deterrence:

So the president says… that his administration is withholding basic medical care as a deterrent to illegal entry.

Of course, withholding basic medical care is not a deterrent to illegal entry any more than confiscating toddlers from mothers is a deterrent, any more than sabotaging the legal right to asylum is a deterrent. Immigrants are crossing the border improperly as I type these words.

But again, “working” is beside the point. The president’s point is punishing brown foreigners for the crime of being brown and foreign.

Similarly, it does not matter that locking up children indefinitely will not stop illegal entry. What matters is locking up people indefinitely who deserve being locked up indefinitely.

Sade’s novels are so dark as to be all but unreadable. In 100 Days of Sodom, he systematically imagines hundreds of tortures, some of them recounted and some of them perpetrated on a dozen or so young people who have been kidnapped and taken to a fortress in the Alps. Each torture is worse than the one before, with painful death the ultimate end.

In Juliette he follows the life of a female sadist and all the horrors she and her accomplices mete out to their victims. Once scene occurs during a picnic on Mount Vesuvius where we see two women turn on a third, bind her, bite and stab her countless times, and finally throw her into the volcano.  

I focus here on Justine, however, because it focuses on an innocent victim. In watching what happens to a sweet young woman as she is captured by one sadist after another, we get a glimpse into why Trump might not be upset by “kids in cages.”

Forget realism in the depiction of Justine. It defies logic how someone could remain innocent, not to mention bodily intact, in the face of all that happens to her. She is tied up, stretched out, raped, whipped, beaten, branded, pricked, bitten, and countless other things in the course of her adventures. Through it all, however, she retains her innocent trust in virtue. Her very innocence enrages her tormentors, who seem to regard it as a personal affront.

And this, I think, helps us understand the mania. They are venting their rage against their own lost innocence as they torture Justine, who must pay for reminding them of what they have lost. When they whip her, they feel as though they are triumphing over their own vulnerability.

At the end of the novel, when Justine appears finally to have reached a place of safety, she is blasted by a lightning bolt. Sade sees innocence in this fallen world as so unnatural that nature will wipe it out if humans don’t.

If Stoehr is right, then Trump is not just unmoved by the suffering he is causing. He gets a thrill from it.

Now that I think about it, Trump as a sadist shouldn’t come as news to us. We saw him voicing sadistic fantasies when he told police to rough up suspects during arrests and when he encouraged fans to beat up protesters.  If it were up to him, he informed us during the campaign, he would bring back waterboarding “and a hell of a lot worse.” He finds it thrilling to engage with autocrats who have the power to mete out suffering and death, such as a Philippine president responsible for thousands of extra-judicial drug killings.

I suspect Trump was far from upset at what happened to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Perhaps he fantasizes about taking a bonesaw to various American journalists.

I could play therapist and speculate how Trump is making the immigrant children pay for how his fascist father crushed his own innocence. This doesn’t excuse him, of course, but knowing sadism’s dynamics helps us understand him better.

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