Rubens and Brueghel, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man
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Wednesday
Someone on BlueSky recently posted a Danielle Coffyn poem in response to the GOP’s S.A.V.E. act, recently passed by Republican members of the House. Part of the GOP’s ongoing attempts to disenfranchise as many voters as possible—their constant accusations of (virtually non-existent) voter fraud are designed to justify their own (very real) voter suppression efforts—SAVE would require voters to show a a birth certificate, U.S. passport, naturalization paperwork, or certain versions of the Read ID that indicate citizenship. As an NPR article points out,
[F]or as many as 69 million American women who have taken on their spouse’s name, their birth certificates no longer match the names they use today, according to an analysis by the progressive Center for American Progress. Meanwhile, more than half of all Americans do not have a passport, according to a 2023 YouGov survey.
While it is true that Republican women as well as Democratic women would be impacted by the law, Republicans probably see them as necessary collateral damage in the attempt to reduce the overall number of women voting, given that more women vote Democratic than Republican. This is certainly true of poor women voters, who are less likely to have any of the documents required.
And of course, there’s Peter Thiel, the Trump-supporting billionaire who doesn’t believe that women should have the right to vote in the first place.
The good news is that Democrats in the Senate will probably filibuster the bill. Still, like GOP efforts to assert control over women’s bodily autonomy, the SAVE act reveals Republicans’ patriarchal ambitions.
With that in mind, here’s Coffyn’s poem:
If Adam Picked the Apple By Danielle Coffyn
There would be a parade, a celebration, a holiday to commemorate the day he sought enlightenment. We would not speak of temptation by the devil, rather, we would laud Adam’s curiosity, his desire for adventure and knowing. We would feast on apple-inspired fare: tortes, chutneys, pancakes, pies. There would be plays and songs reenacting his courage.
But it was Eve who grew bored, weary of her captivity in Eden. And a woman’s desire for freedom is rarely a cause for celebration.
Note: As much as I love Paradise Lost, which includes Eve complaining that God “forbids us to be wise,” Milton’s division of men and women into thinkers and feelers reenforces the stereotype that underlie GOP patriarchal assumptions. When angels are sent to Eden to deliver TED talks on the origins of the universe and what is to come, they speak only to Adam. For her part, Eve is sent away before Raphael warns Adam about Satan, and she is sedated before Michael foretells human history. While she is depicted as more intuitive than Adam, Reason is clearly man’s domain.
Let’s just say that the GOP at the moment is being guided more by emotion than by Reason.
Bartolomé Estaban Murillo, Joseph and His Brethren
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Tuesday
As Jewish families and communities come together this week to relive the escape from Egyptian slavery, I am struck by how Trump’s America is reenacting the Joseph story. Just as Joseph’s deeply resentful brothers sold him into bondage, so “Mass Deportation Now” Republicans are celebrating as innocent immigrants are deported to foreign dungeons.
Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer has ranked “the sublime scribe of the Joseph story” with Chekhov and Maupassant as masters of the short story form. One can read these authors “over and over again and never get bored,” Singer says. Here’s the part of the story that aligns with ICE kidnapping Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and other immigrants:
Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made an ornate robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”
His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said….
So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him.
“Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams”….
So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the ornate robe he was wearing— and they took him and threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty; there was no water in it.
As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt.
Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed.
So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekelsof silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt.
Modern day Ishmaelites—in this case, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele—are getting both the slave and the money ($20,000 a year for each prisoner sent).
The resentment that Donald Trump has stoked against immigrants is all there in the story. Many white Americans are convinced that immigrants are getting preferential treatment and that they operate with a Josephian sense of entitlement. (Following last week’s Hands Off demonstration I encountered a woman who told me that immigrants don’t have to pay taxes for their first six years.) In their fear and anger, they are more than willing to see them carted off to inhumane conditions.
In the post I wrote following that demonstration, I reported on how the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers of the 1950s and 1960s–which feature kindly cops, Boy Scouts, shy teachers, solicitous soldiers, kindly Santas, etc.–assured my childhood self that Americans are fundamentally decent people. It is a foundational belief of many liberals that our better angels (to borrow from Lincoln) will ultimately prevail. But what if this belief is wrong? I didn’t mention that virtually all the figures in Rockwell’s paintings of small town life—from 1916 until 1964—are white. Only when his own assumptions about Americans were shaken to the core by southern racist violence did Rockwell change. (His famous The Problem We All Live With shows six-year-old Ruby Bridges going to school flanked by four U.S. marshals.)
Because of bipartisan support of civil rights in the 1960s (if one excludes the south), liberals felt that we could in fact step into our better selves. But instead of northern liberals changing the south, it now appears that southern intolerance has infected a significant sector of the north, with Confederate flags now a not uncommon sign in former Union states. Political scientist John Stoehr writes that, just as liberals “grossly underestimate the power of corruption, greed, arrogance and stupidity,” so do they “grossly overestimate the inherent goodness of the American people”:
White liberals seem naive about the current character of the American people, because most are living in the past. In the postwar era, there was a consensus about the government, that it should serve everyone, and from that arose all the rights movements. After four decades of rightwing propaganda, that consensus is gone.
And yet, Stoehr concludes, liberals keep clinging to their naiveté.
To be sure, not everyone has had our illusions about this “inherent goodness.” I’m currently on a Louise Erdrich kick, and there are few novels where the Chippewa author doesn’t mention past White atrocities, whether in the form of bounties for Indian scalps, massacres, land grabs, and the like. But with the rise of rights movements of the 1970s, there was reason to hope that the worst was behind us.
Now that faith has been shaken.
So where does that leave us now? It is up to us to resist Trumpian intolerance in whatever forms it takes. “Hope never never came from people who succumbed to evil,” Stoehr writes. “It comes from people who can face evil squarely in the face and then act accordingly.”
Passover is a time to face up to evil and then remind ourselves that hope has triumphed in the past and can do so again. Back in 2011 I shared Primo Levi’s “Passover,” which is so beloved that it has been incorporated into many people’s seder rituals. As an Auschwitz survivor, Levi knew at a deep, deep level what it means to become a demonized Other.
Each of us has been a slave in Egypt, Soaked straw and clay with sweat, And crossed the sea dry-footed. You too, stranger.
And then there’s the Adam Zagajewski Passover poem I shared in 2023, which alerts us to the plight of the world’s refugees:
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world.
I fear for the souls of those who sign on to Trump’s bigotry and rejoice over his cruelties. All those politicians, spokespeople, Cabinet officials, lawyers, ICE members, bureaucrats, and other supporters are being hollowed out by the hate. While Passover cannot change the world’s injustices, it gives us a chance to ground ourselves in what is right and true.
Or as Levi concludes his poem,
This year in fear and shame, Next year in virtue and in justice.
John R. Neill, King Gos and Queen Cor bribe the nome king to imprison innocent captives in Rinki-Tink in Oz
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Monday
The Kakaesque horror of Trump’s deportation of immigrants to a Salvadoran hellhole, including (thanks to an admitted “administrative error”) legal U.S. resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, demonstrates that George Orwell should have added 40 years to his masterwork. Can we retitle it 2025 and note that it is no longer predicting a dystopian future but describing a present-day reality? And will we ever wake up from this nightmare?
As I was reading about these deportations to El Salvador, I started experiencing an unsettling sense of familiarity. Something similar happens in one of my favorite Oz books, L. Frank Baum’s Rinki-Tink in Oz.
I vividly remember, as a child, reading about the seizure of the king and queen of Pingaree by ruthless raiders from the twin island of Regos and Coregos. When Prince Inga, aided by three magical pearls that give him strength, protection, and advice, goes to free his parents, they are deported carried to the prison of a foreign dictator. In return for a substantial bribe, Nome King Kaliko agrees to hold them as indefinite prisoners in his underground prisons.
In light of recent events, I am almost as disturbed by rereading the episode now as I was when I read the book at age 10 or so.
After Inga, aided by the pearls, invades the islands, Queen Cor figures they must use the boy’s parents as hostages:
We must take the boy’s parents away from here as quickly as possible. I have with me the Queen of Pingaree, and you can run up to the mines and get the King. Then we will carry them away in a boat and hide them where the boy cannot find them, with all his magic. We will use the King and Queen of Pingaree as hostages, and send word to the boy wizard that if he does not go away from our islands and allow us to rule them undisturbed, in our own way, we will put his father and mother to death. Also we will say that as long as we are let alone his parents will be safe, although still safely hidden. I believe, Gos, that in this way we can compel Prince Inga to obey us, for he seems very fond of his parents.
Their plan is to send them to the novel’s version of a Salvadoran prison:
“It isn’t a bad idea,” said Gos, reflectively; “but where can we hide the King and Queen, so that the boy cannot find them?”
“In the country of the Nome King, on the mainland away at the south,” she replied. “The nomes are our friends, and they possess magic powers that will enable them to protect the prisoners from discovery.”
Thanks to advice from his wisdom pearl, Inga tracks his parents to the nome king’s realm, only to encounter a ruler using the logic presently being used by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele. Bukele is being paid $20,000 a year per inmate he takes in, and Nome King Kaliko is similarly transactional. As he explains to the king and queen of Pingaree when they protest their innocence and charge Gos and Cor of lying about them,
I know it. I consider it a clever lie, though, because it is woven without a thread of truth. However, that is none of my business. The fact remains that my good friend King Gos wishes to put you in my underground caverns, so that you will be unable to escape. And why should I not please him in this little matter? Gos is a mighty King and a great warrior, while your island of Pingaree is desolated and your people scattered. In my heart, King Kitticut, I sympathize with you, but as a matter of business policy we powerful Kings must stand together and trample the weaker ones under our feet…. The fact that you are a prisoner, my poor Kitticut, is evidence that you are weaker than King Gos, and I prefer to deal with the strong.
Bukele is operating similarly. He knows perfectly well that many of the prisoners being sent to him (those not taken directly out of U.S. prisons) are innocent of gang membership. But as Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark observes,
Let us speak plainly: Nayib Bukele is a minor strongman who will do whatever Donald Trump demands of him. If Trump wants Abrego Garcia in the United States, then Bukele will return him. By the same token, if Bukele understands that Trump does not want Abrego Garcia returned, then he will keep the man.
Bukele has no interests in this game other than pleasing his political patron. His exercise of Salvadoran “sovereignty” can only be read as an expression of Donald Trump’s will.
Anyone who asserts otherwise is either a villain or a fool.
So if Bukele affirmatively refuses to repatriate Abrego Garcia, it will mean that Trump has told him not to.
I suspect, however, that Bukele does not talk as frankly to Trump as Kaliko talks to the rulers of the twin islands. “In spite of your false statements and misrepresentations,” he tells them, “I will earn the treasure you have brought me, by keeping your prisoners safe in my caverns.”
Heaven knows what will happen to Abrego Garcia and the others illegally sent to foreign prisons without a chance to appeal their cases. In the novel there’s a deus ex machina ending that I found disappointing as a child. Dorothy, now a princess in Oz, has been keeping track of events through Glinda’s magical Great Book of Records, “wherein is inscribed all important events that happen in every part of the world.” When she learns about Inga, she gets Ozma’s permission to intervene.
She shows up in Kaliko’s realm with a basket of eggs, which the nomes find to be toxic, and demands that he release Inga’s parents. Kaliko at first argues that he has to honor his contract. In this, he sounds a bit like the Trump administration, which is contending that it is no longer “custodian”:
“I can’t do it, Dorothy,” said the Nome King, almost weeping with despair. “I promised King Gos I’d keep them captives. You wouldn’t ask me to break my promise, would you?”
Dorothy replies,
“King Gos was a robber and an outlaw, and p’r’aps you don’t know that a storm at sea wrecked his boat, while he was going back to Regos, and that he and Queen Cor were both drowned.
So between being offered this out and threatened with eggs (presumably purchased at non-inflationary prices), Kaliko frees the king and queen of Pingaree.
Right now, the only hope of those imprisoned is the U.S. Court System. Can judges compel Trump to release people who have been deported to foreign jails? Or will they prove less powerful than Ozma and her emissary Dorothy? We don’t yet know the answer.
Marc Chagall, Passover with Elijah at the Open Doorway
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Sunday – Passover (April 12-20)
In Judaism’s Passover seder, there’s a tradition to leave a place at the table for the prophet Elijah. According to Brandeis University’s Joseph Dorman, the custom is “an evolving symbol of hope and redemption,” with Elijah’s return symbolizing the Messiah’s earthly arrival.
Dorman notes that this is a strange role for Elijah, who was “an impassioned firebrand.” His zealotry was too much for the world to handle and even God saw him as over the top at one point. If he was to be admitted to the Passover meal—the practice dates back to the 11th century—he would have to be tamed down a bit, and Dorman says that this Passover Elijah “is zealous to right wrongs. He’s zealous to help the poor. He can’t stay away from Earth when somebody is in trouble.”
Mage Piercy’s Elijah or Eliyahu combines both the uncomfortable zealotry and the commitment to bringing out the best in us (which, after all, can be uncomfortable). We need Elijah “in rough times, out of smoke/ and dust that swirls blinding us.” He may not be decorous, sometimes appearing “in the form a wild man,/ as a homeless sidewalk orator.” But the words that burn and cut us also “cut us loose so we rise and go again/ over the sharp rocks upward.”
Chag Pesach Sameach! Happy Passover!
The Cup of Eliyahu By Marge Piercy
In life you had a temper. Your sarcasm was a whetted knife. Sometimes you shuddered with fear but you made yourself act no matter how few stood with you. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.
Now you return to us in rough times, out of smoke and dust that swirls blinding us. You come in vision, you come in lightning on blackness. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.
In every generation you return speaking what few want to hear words that burn us, that cut us loose so we rise and go again over the sharp rocks upward. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.
You come as a wild man, as a homeless sidewalk orator, you come as a woman taking the bima, you come in prayer and song, you come in a fierce rant. Open the door for Eliyahu that she may come in.
Prophecy is not a gift, but sometimes a curse, Jonah refusing. It is dangerous to be right, to be righteous. To stand against the wall of might. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in.
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Friday
Yesterday I recommended the Sustack blog The Editorial Board for political scientist John Stoehr’s counterintuitive insights into the psychology of the Trump faithful. Monetary self-interest will not push voters towards the Democrats, Stoehr argues, and the figure of Barbara Kingsolver’s Nick Tavoularis in Unsettled helps us understand why. Stoehr has a similar take on wealthy Trump supporters who are being hurt by his financial shenanigans. They too, he says, will continue to hang with Trump and the GOP because they get something more important than money from the alliance. They get power.
Stoehr calls this “Plantation mentality,” which sends me to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Stoehr learned about the concept when he worked as a Georgia arts reporter:
My source recalled for me his experience arbitrating contract negotiations between a local orchestra’s musicians and management. He gave up, he told me, because there was no reasoning with the orchestra’s aristocratic donors. They expected the musicians to work for pennies. When they used their lawful rights to demand more, donors saw the move as tantamount to armed robbery. Years later, they [the donors] shut the whole organization down as punishment for the injustice.
Stoehr tells us that the wealthy particularly resent
the constraints that are placed on that power by democratic politics and the rule of law. When you are born believing the ability to control the minds and bodies of others is a God-given right, the law becomes a crime. Reducing lesser mortals to the level of serfdom is an act of liberation.
In Gone with the Wind, we see the sense of entitlement that comes with owning a literal plantation. As Mitchell frames her story, the villains in the novel are the federal troops that destroy the Tara plantation, the federal government that taxes it, and the African Americans who refuse to keep working for it.
From the very first pages we see this sense of entitlement in Scarlett’s three brothers:
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books….[R]aising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
From the funeral oration honoring founder Gerald O’Hara, we are given the sense that he built Tara all by himself. There’s no mention of the slave labor required–which is to say, Mitchell is no Faulkner and Gone with the Wind is no Absalom, Absolom!:
He warn’t scared of the English government when they wanted to hang him. He just lit out and left home. And when he come to this country and was pore, that didn’t scare him a mite neither. He went to work and he made his money. And he warn’t scared to tackle this section when it was part wild and the Injuns had just been run out of it. He made a big plantation out of a wilderness. And when the war come on and his money begun to go, he warn’t scared to be pore again. And when the Yankees come through Tara and might of burnt him out or killed him, he warn’t fazed a bit and he warn’t licked neither. He just planted his front feet and stood his ground. That’s why I say he had our good points. There ain’t nothin’ FROM THE OUTSIDE can lick any of us.
For her part, Scarlett cannot imagine herself living in anything less than her former plantation splendor. She’d rather die than go back to scratching a living from the land like the pioneers of old, she says. “Tara isn’t going to be like that,” she says defiantly. “Not even if I have to plow myself.” But of course, she isn’t going to plow it herself. As she acknowledges at a more rational moment,
Without the darkies, it will be all we can do to keep body and soul together. Nobody can run a big plantation without the darkies, and lots of the fields won’t be cultivated at all and the woods will take over the fields again. Nobody can plant much cotton, and what will we do then?
Her problem is that the “darkies” she needs won’t work for slave wages. Mitchell weighs in here, accusing African Americans of being shiftless for not coming to Scarlett’s aid. Note how the author characterizes the former slaveowners as “kind-hearted” in this imagined scenario:
The old darkies went back to the plantations gladly, making a heavier burden than ever on the poverty-stricken planters who had not the heart to turn them out, but the young ones remained in Atlanta. They did not want to be workers of any kind, anywhere. Why work when the belly is full?
Today they would be called welfare cheats reliant on government handouts. Trump-supporting CEOs, affronted by workers who want a living wage and pro-union legislation, would rather have Trump burn down the world economy than pay their fair share of taxes and abide by workplace regulations. I’m not sure who feels more aggrieved, the MAGA rich or the MAGA poor.
Plantation mentality is real. They must have their Taras and damn the consequences.
Additional note: When I was a grad student at Emory University in Atlanta, our Professor of Southern Literature–Floyd Watson–created a minor controversy when he penned an editorial for The Atlanta Constitution where he dismissed Gone with the Wind as popular literature and not very deep. If great literature depicts people in their full humanity, one can set Mitchell’s handling of African American characters against works like Light in August and Intruder in the Dust, by her contemporary Faulkner, to see that Watkins was absolutely correct.
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Thursday
I recently listened to Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018), which as suggested by the title deals with economic uncertainty (including houses that are falling down). The novel toggles back and forth between 2016, with Trump’s presidential campaign as backdrop, and 1874, when debates about Charles Darwin are raging. While Unsheltered is not one of Kingsolver’s best novels, it’s nevertheless worth reading, with its mixture of social commentary, love of nature, and concern about struggling families. I write about it today because of its insightful depiction of a Trump supporter.
Kingsolver notices aspects of Trump fandom that political scientist John Stoehr focuses on in his Substack blog Editorial Board. I appreciate Stoehr for the way he disputes conventional political wisdom about what drives MAGA. Trump, he contends, is giving his supporters exactly what they want from him, even when he makes their lives harder. Forget about them ever seeing the light and voting Democratic, he says. What they like is how Trump does even more damage to the people they hate:
It’s not that Trump voters were mad at Biden, because he didn’t do enough about inflation. I think they were mad at him, because he did more than any president to expand the economic pie to include all those who are usually left behind, especially Black people.
In other words, it didn’t matter that Biden delivered on his promise to expand the economy from the bottom up and from the inside out. As far as MAGA was concerned, the problem was that he succeeded. “Sad as it is,” Stoehr writes,
the fact remains that when Black Americans are doing well for themselves, too many white people in this country start feeling like something is wrong, something is being taken from them, someone somewhere is cheating them, even when they are in fact thriving. It’s white-power’s zero-sum. If America includes “them,” it excludes “us.”
This, by the way, is the central point of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which to my mind is the best explanation of how race works in America.
Kingsolver’s Nick Tavoularis is a prime example of our caste system at work. A refugee from the Greek civil war of 1946-49, Nick comes to the United States self-identifying as White. This means that, although a lowly immigrant, he can see himself as superior to all people of color. Or as he calls them, wetbacks, spics, monkeys and chinks.
It doesn’t matter that he lost his factory job in the 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan’s anti-union laws. The real culprits, as he sees it, are the Mexican immigrants. To which his daughter-in-law Willa sarcastically responds, “I see. Illegal Mexican immigrants invaded your plant, wrestled the white guys to the ground, escorted them out, and then told the company, ‘Sure boss, we don’t need any union wages.’”
Given Nick’s working-class background, Willa can’t understand why he is drawn to Trump. Her daughter Tig has it figured out, however. Here’s their conversation:
“I sure don’t get it. He loves this billionaire running for president who’s never lifted a finger doing anything Nick would call work. Why that guy?”
“Because rich white guys are supposed to be running the world. Papu thinks this dude must have put in the time and gamed the system to get his billions, because that’s how it works in America. So it’s his turn to be president. What Papu can’t stand is getting pushed out of the way by people he doesn’t even think should be voting, never mind getting jobs or benefits or whatever.”
“Never mind the White House.”
“Definitely that. He thinks they’re cutting into the line ahead of him. How can black and brown people get to have nice stuff and be in charge of things? Or women, God forbid. When Papu didn’t get his turn yet?”
Tig observes that Nick is not alone:
There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they’re scared. This guy says he’s bringing back yesterday, even if he has to use brass knuckles to do it, and drag women back to the cave by their hair. He’s a bully, everybody knows that. But he’s their bully.
What Kingsolver wrote in 2018 is even more evident today. Here’s Tig again:
Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club.
Willa imagines that it must be exhausting to Nick “to keep track of individual grudges against so many disparate objects, people, and doctrines.” Wouldn’t it be easier, she thinks, “to have some unifying theory of hatred that covered everything at once.” But her daughter is more tolerant, observing, “I can be nice to Papu. He’s basically over.”
The irony, as Democrats pointed out during the 2024 election and as is becoming painfully evident to many Trump supporters now, is that they are reliant on many of the welfare programs that Nick has contempt for. By the end of the novel, Nick’s family has enrolled him in Medicare and Obamacare behind his back because it’s the only way his emphysema and diabetes will be treated. They also sneak his ashes into the historical cemetery that he requested but which they can’t afford.
They are forced to these measures because they are going through their own hard times. Iano is a political science professor who is working for peanuts as an adjunct professor after losing his tenured job when his college folded. To his horror, he discovers that their family medical insurance plan won’t cover his father. Willa, meanwhile, has lost her job with a magazine; their adult daughter Tig has returned to live at home; and their son, who has graduated from Harvard with a mountain of college debt, leaves his son to be raised by them after his partner commits suicide. Nick’s obliviousness to their sacrifices on his behalf is not unlike the way that Red States ignore how many of their programs are financed by Blue States. While others pay the bills, they listen to rightwing radio complaining about freeloading people of color.
Will hard times change their mindset? Stoehr contends it won’t make any difference. The more the Trump faithful suffer, he says, “the closer they are likely going to bind themselves to the president.” Their suffering, he says, “will be taken as proof of their patriotism and devotion to the cause of justice, and because their savior will be the only one who can relieve them of it.”
As regards liberals and progressives, Stoehr faults those who “can’t or won’t see the role of racism in politics.” One only has to read Unsheltered to see how deep the problem goes. Our best hope, Stoehr goes on to say, is not that Democrats will win over people like Nick. Racist resentment cuts too deep for that, and for many years into the future there will be immigrants—including Hispanics, South Asians, and others–who keep America’s caste system going as they self-identify as White. The hope, he says, is that not every demagogue will have Trump’s drawing power so that the Nicks of the world will refrain from voting.
Library page boys awaiting the opening of the Cincinnati Public Library (1925)
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Wednesday
As this is National Library Week, I take the occasion to celebrate libraries and librarians as being critical in the fight to preserve democracy. Unfortunately, every day we see new attacks on libraries including, most recently, the Naval Academy Library. In advance of a visit from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that library removed 381 titles, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (Thanks to Katherine Zammit for the alert.)
The list also includes Memorializing the Holocaust, Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust, and How to Be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. Also listed are The Making of Black Lives Matter, by Christopher J. Lebron; How Racism Takes Place, by George Lipsitz; The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward; The Myth of Equality, by Ken Wytsma; studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America.
The list also includes books about gender and sexuality, like Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex by Elizabeth Reis, and Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes by Gerald N. Callahan.
When librarians are kept from sharing books freely with the public, minds narrow and growth is stunted, although these outcomes appear of no concern to the Trump administration. In fact, it may regard them as desirable.
In my book Better Living through Literature, I note some of the gifts we receive from libraries. For instance, during War I librarians played an important healing role, distributing books to wounded veterans. In the process, they noted the various therapeutic effects that books had on patients, with Theodor Wesley Koch of the Library of Congress noting that “stories are sometimes better than doctors.” (Thanks to Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss for informing me of this.)
Koch also noticed that “a novel with a happy ending is not necessarily a stimulant to the depressed patient, who may be tempted to contrast his own wretched state with that of the happy hero. Nor is every tragedy a depressant.” Elaborating on the latter, he observed that “a serious book may prove to be better reading for a nervous patient than something in a lighter vein – he may get new courage and a firm resolve to be master of his fate and by reading of another’s struggle against adverse circumstances.”
Through his observations, Koch helped found the practice of bibliotherapy.
Unfortunately, librarians and teachers recommending books is coming under fire, including threats of imprisonment. According to Musk Watch, for instance, lawmakers in Texas
are seeking to impose harsh criminal penalties on school librarians and teachers who provide award-winning works of literature to students. Identical bills in the Texas Senate and House would make it a crime for librarians and teachers to provide books or learning materials that contain sexually explicit content, punishable by up to 10 years behind bars — whether or not a book has educational or literary merit.
If we are to go by books singled out by Texas legislators in recent years, teachers and librarians could be jailed for teaching or recommending Catcher in the Rye, Bluest Eye, Handmaid’s Tale, The Color Purple, not to mention dozens of young adult novels.
The article mentions other states threatening penalties:
In my book, I talk about the conflicting agendas between such conservatives and young people when it comes to reading:
From the many essays I have received from students on instances of censorship, I have learned that some version of the following dynamic is usually at play: students turn to works like Perks of Being a Wallflower and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret because they hunger for information. As they leave their family cocoons and enter a world that contains drugs, sexuality, race tension, suicide, gender and sexual identity confusion, and other major life issues, they want to know what is going on. Teachers and librarians, whose job it is to help them learn and mature, are generally sympathetic and will often assign such works, either during the school year or for summer reading. On the other hand, parents, who are programmed to keep their kids safe, sometimes fear losing their children to an uncertain world that is beyond their control. In too many cases they blame the books and sometimes the teachers themselves for prematurely plunging their sons and daughters into that world.
According to their accounts, students generally side with the teachers and librarians. After all, the world is an uncertain place—even more so with easy access to the internet—and young people are looking for resources that will help them negotiate uncomfortable realities.
Censorship perhaps works as an indirect compliment, testifying to the explosive power of literature. Perhaps Trumpists have reasons to be worried as literature has helped and is helping former colonized populations, women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, LBGTQ+ folk, those with disabilities, and others find their voice while, at the same time, challenging reigning power assumptions. As I observe in my book,
Perhaps literature teachers have been more successful than they realized in developing open-minded human beings resolved to think for themselves. Maybe that’s a big reason why anti-Enlightenment forces are increasing their attacks on school libraries and classroom curricula, not to mention public schools themselves. Several times in these pages I’ve compared reading literature to playing with dynamite or waving a loaded gun, and many rightwing extremists would agree. They fear that once young readers—or readers of any age—immerse themselves in books, powerful feelings, ideas, and even movements will be unleashed.
I conclude today’s blog with this excerpt from my book’s conclusion:
If literature can indeed sometimes change our lives and sometimes change our world, then a special responsibility is laid upon those of you who connect others with books, whether you be a parent, a librarian, a teacher, a critic, a therapist, a social worker, a member of the clergy, a book discussion group leader, or just a friend recommending a good read. Think of yourselves as literature coaches. You are handling a rare, precious and, yes, sometimes dangerous substance, but any risks involved are worth it because the potential payoff is so great.
The reflective conversations that occur after one has immersed oneself in a work are particularly important. You can talk with your child about how a particular character negotiates a challenging situation and with your students about a work’s insights into their own life situations. You can also talk about a work’s blindnesses: is it hampered by race, gender, class, and other biases that keep it from acknowledging the full humanity of its subject or does it manage to transcend the prejudices of the author or of the age? One can regard these very discussions as citizenship training exercises since often they will arise when the work touches on hot button social issues. The best literature, being as complex as life, will provide plenty of material for rich conversations….
In other words, we cannot know how readers will employ the social dynamite we put into their hands. Our job, then, is to develop thoughtful and independent-minded men and women who will take stories and poems that catch their fancy and run with them. Once we’ve linked people up to the power source and directed their attention to the on-off button, the next step is to get out of their way.
If the literature is good, they will be okay. As we have noted, thinkers from Aristotle to Sir Philip Sidney to Samuel Johnson to Percy Shelley to Friedrich Engels to W.E.B. Du Bois to Martha Nussbaum have noted that the best authors are those who are most true to experience and do most honor to humanity’s richness. In a 2018 essay, British-Indian author Salman Rushdie responded to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House by pointing out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers was “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
At some deep level, this is why people turn to literature. They intuitively recognize that masterworks, whether old classics or new arrivals, have the power to point us towards the individual and social transformation we crave. These works can turn us upside down and inside out as no other form of writing can. The culture wars forget this when they attempt to reduce literature to politics. When conservatives think that only older works are of value and that works by women or people of color have nothing to teach them, then they are circumscribing their vision of the world. The same is true for those radicals who think that writers and readers should stay within the bounds of their own communities. The thinkers we have surveyed in this book know literature is more powerful and challenging than any of these simplistic ways of thinking, as do good literature teachers, librarians and other of literature’s advocates. They know—and you do as well—that a rich life opens before us the moment we pick up a book and immerse ourselves in its words.
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Tuesday
Born in 1951, I was raised in a small Tennessee college town and remember growing up at a time when we said the “Pledge of Allegiance,” committing ourselves every morning to “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Looking back, I realize that this was our sacred credo for what was in essence a civil religion.
We also sang patriotic songs, such as “America the Beautiful, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” and the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty.” And we read patriotic poems, one of which I’ll share with you in a moment.
At the time, Norman Rockwell’s paintings dominated the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, assuring us that (1) Americans were basically decent people and (2) we should all learn to get along and respect each other. Meanwhile, Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibit, featuring photographs of people from all over the globe, extended that vision to the world at large. Our glory and strength as a nation, we believed, lay in the way that we could appreciate and welcome a wide variety of people.
Not everything was rosy, of course. The cold war was going on and segregation reigned in the south. If America’s civil religion came under severe attack during the 1960s, it was in large part because young people saw the country failing to live up to the ideals they had been taught in school. I fled the south when it was time to attend college because of the racism, and I remember feeling personally betrayed by being expected to fight in a war whose rationale no one could adequately explain. But despite our disillusion, the ideals themselves formed our core. If I am in any way typical, many of the seniors who participated in the “Hands Off” demonstrations this past weekend felt propelled by this foundational identity.
Senior citizens were certainly in abundance at the demonstration I attended near the federal building in Winchester TN. Given that Franklin County went 75-25 to Trump, I figured we’d be lucky to draw 50 people and was therefore amazed when around 250 showed up. For two hours we brandished our signs, listened to speakers, and shouted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Elon Musk has got to go.”
While issues like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were certainly on our minds, so were the threats to democracy. And because of the rise of Trumpian authoritarianism, those old poems—which as college kids we dismissed as cheesy—seem to carry special significance. That goes for Henry Holcomb Bennett’s “The Flag Goes By”:
Hats off! Along the street there comes A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums, A dash of color beneath the sky: Hats off! The flag is passing by!
Blue and crimson and white it shines, Over the steel-tipped, ordered lines. Hats off! The colors before us fly; But more than the flag is passing by.
Sea-fights and land-fights, grim and great, Fought to make and to save the State: Weary marches and sinking ships; Cheers of victory on dying lips;
Days of plenty and years of peace; March of a strong land’s swift increase; Equal justice, right and law, Stately honor and reverend awe;
Sign of a nation, great and strong To ward her people from foreign wrong: Pride and glory and honor,–all Live in the colors to stand or fall.
Hats off! Along the street there comes A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums; And loyal hearts are beating high: Hats off! The flag is passing by!
Amen to “equal justice, right and law.” What the flag symbolizes and what we once took for granted seems most precious when we are in danger of losing it.
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Monday
Today being William Wordsworth’s birthday, I share a poem he wrote about leadership. His description, which probably has Trafalgar hero Admiral Horatio Nelson in mind, is everything our current president is not. On the other hand, it does a pretty good job of capturing our past two Democratic presidents, what with its emphasis on public service, self-sacrifice, and high moral character.
For instance, one thinks of how Joe Biden, suffering unimaginable loss (a wife, a daughter, a grown-up son), found inner strength from his tragedy. As Wordsworth puts it,
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train! Turns his necessity to glorious gain…
And then there’s Barack Obama, whose commitment to making healthcare available to millions of previously uninsured (and sometimes uninsurable) Americans makes the following description applicable:
Who, not content that former worth stand fast, Looks forward, persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpassed…
Uncharacteristically for Wordsworth, he chose to write his poem mostly in heroic couplets (although there are occasional triplets, as in the examples above). This style is associated more with 18th century classicism than 19th century Romanticism. In fact, the poem shares certain characteristics with Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.
The poem makes one long for the days when such qualities were valued in our presidents. Sadly, the cult of Donald Trump has prompted millions of Americans to abandon such standards—and, in the case of some worshippers, to accept his self-valuation that he is greater than both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Character of a Happy Warrior By William Wordsworth
Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he That every man in arms should wish to be? —It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: Whose high endeavors are an inward light That makes the path before him always bright; Who, with a natural instinct to discern What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; Abides by this resolve, and stops not there, But makes his moral being his prime care; Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train! Turns his necessity to glorious gain; In face of these doth exercise a power Which is our human nature’s highest dower: Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives: By objects, which might force the soul to abate Her feeling, rendered more compassionate; Is placable—because occasions rise So often that demand such sacrifice; More skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure, As tempted more; more able to endure, As more exposed to suffering and distress; Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. —’Tis he whose law is reason; who depends Upon that law as on the best of friends; Whence, in a state where men are tempted still To evil for a guard against worse ill, And what in quality or act is best Doth seldom on a right foundation rest, He labors good on good to fix, and owes To virtue every triumph that he knows: —Who, if he rise to station of command, Rises by open means; and there will stand On honorable terms, or else retire, And in himself possess his own desire; Who comprehends his trust, and to the same Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim; And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait For wealth, or honors, or for worldly state; Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall, Like showers of manna, if they come at all: Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace; But who, if he be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad for human kind, Is happy as a Lover; and attired With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired; And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw; Or if an unexpected call succeed, Come when it will, is equal to the need: —He who, though thus endued as with a sense And faculty for storm and turbulence, Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans To home felt pleasures and to gentle scenes; Sweet images! which, wheresoe’er he be, Are at his heart; and such fidelity It is his darling passion to approve; More brave for this, that he hath much to love:— ‘Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high, Conspicuous object in a Nation’s eye, Or left unthought-of in obscurity,— Who, with a toward or untoward lot, Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not— Plays, in the many games of life, that one Where what he most doth value must be won: Whom neither shape or danger can dismay, Nor thought of tender happiness betray; Who, not content that former worth stand fast, Looks forward, persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpassed: Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth Forever, and to noble deeds give birth, Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame, And leave a dead unprofitable name— Finds comfort in himself and in his cause; And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws His breath in confidence of Heaven’s applause: This is the happy Warrior; this is he That every man in arms should wish to be.
