Trump’s Viking-Like Threats

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Monday

Among the many dispiriting responses to Donald Trump’s fascist takeover of America is the way that previously responsible people have been groveling before him. One of the latest is the law firm of Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, who have caved in to the president’s shakedown as one surrenders to a mob boss. Until I read a William Kristol column in the Bulwark, however, I didn’t know that Rudyard Kipling has described this behavior in his poem “Dane-Geld.”

As the Associated Press describes it, Trump’s recent attack on Weiss is the latest in a series of actions targeting law firms whose lawyers have performed legal work that Trump disagrees with. In this instance, his presidential order

threatened the suspension of security clearances for Paul Weiss attorneys as well as the termination of any federal contracts involving the firm. It cited as an explanation the fact that a former Paul Weiss attorney, Mark Pomerantz, had been a central player in an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into Trump’s finances before Trump became president.

Weiss, fearing that his law firm would be driven out of business, offered Trump $40 million in pro bono services, at which point Trump withdrew his threat. Kristol titled his account of the capitulation, “Paul Weiss Pays the Dane Geld,” a reference to Kipling’s poem:

Dane-Geld
By Rudyard Kipling

IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
   To call upon a neighbor and to say:–
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
   Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
   And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
   And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
   To puff and look important and to say:–
“Though we know we should defeat you, 
                               we have not the time to meet you.
   We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
   But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
   You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
   For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
   You will find it better policy to say:–

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
   No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
   And the nation that plays it is lost!”

At the moment, Trump is Kipling’s “armed and agile nation” to Weiss’s “rich and lazy nation.” Weiss has been instructed to “pay up or be molested,” along with the promise that his firm will be safe once they do so. Fat chance, say both Kipling and Kristol. Paying the Dane-geld is letting the Dane know that he can keep demanding. “If once you have paid him the Dane-geld,” the poet points out, “You will never get rid of the Dane.”

Knowing this, progressives, liberals, and traditional Republicans like Kristol are begging those in leadership positions—whether they be heads of law firms, universities, media companies, or Senate Democrats—not to buckle under. They understand too well that “the end of that game is oppression and shame,/ And the nation that plays it is lost!”

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Earth’s Crammed with Heaven

Chagall, Moses and the Burning Bush

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Sunday

Today’s Old Testament reading recounts Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes wonderful use of the episode in Book 7 of her long narrative poem Aurora Leigh.

To set you up for it, here’s the passage from Exodus:

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Following this initial encounter, God proceeds to instruct Moses about his exodus mission.

Aurora Leigh is a young woman’s first-person account of her life, including her writing endeavors. In the book she is writing, she is determined to capture truth, which is that the natural world is infused with God’s spirit. The artist who separates nature from spirit, she says,

Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points. 

Then, in a passage that blows me away, she invokes Moses’s burning bush:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more, from the first similitude.

Then, to again punctuate art’s purpose,

Art’s the witness of what Is
Behind this show. 

For another artistic rendition of the burning bush episode, here’s a poem by one Michael Lewis that appeared in Modern Reformation. He too reveals “what Is behind the snow” as he charts Moses’s path from “majestic Pharaoh” to the far more powerful beauty of God:

Sestina of the Burning Bush
By Michael Lewis

The sun is high, the land brilliant and beautiful
this morning as I tend the flock, the whole
camp behind me, the land before, the burning
heat upon me. The sheep are grazing, and awful
thoughts consume me; thoughts of the glory
I left behind, of the majesty

of the city I grew up in. The majestic
Pharaoh looms large in my mind: his beauty,
his power, his knowledge, his glory.
And now my thoughts turn to another, the whole
event drowning me, and the awful reality of his death, and my soul burns

in agony. The pain is short as a light burns
my eyes; the light is distant, but majestic,
and though the flame wavers, an awful
feeling rises from within. The beauty
of the light draws me forward, and I am wholly
enchanted by its purity, by its glory.

Thoughts of my past filter away in the glory
of the bush, a fire within but not burning
and not consumed. This must be holy
ground. A voice from within the bush, majestic
and great, calls my name, “Moses,” and the beauty
overwhelms me. “Moses,” the voice, awful

and tender, calls me forward, to the awe-filled
presence of the flame. “This is my glory,
this is what you have longed for, my beauty.”
I press onward, toward the flame, the burning
bush that speaks my name, and the majesty
which I yearn for. “Moses, this is holy

ground, take off your sandals; for I am holy.”
My bare feet are against the awful
heat from the flame of the bush of the majesty
of the Lord. I look behind me, to the glory
surrounding me, all from the burning
bush, resplendent in all God’s beauty.

“Moses, I am holy,” the glory
speaks, and the awful presence of the burning
bush is replaced with majesty, and His beauty.

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Berry and Milton on Love and Hate

Gustave Doré, Satan in Paradise Lost

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Friday

Several months ago Mel Endy, my former dean and colleague, sent out this Wendell Berry poem, which helps explain for me some of the “lonely, eager hate” that we are seeing from Trumpists. As grim as the poem may seem, I find it uplifting in the way it grounds me in my core belief that love is “the only world; it is Heaven and Earth.” It also points to the emptiness of those define their lives by resentment:

Sabbath Poems, #4
By Wendell Berry

Hate has no world.
The people of hate must try
to possess the world of love,
for it is the only world;
it is Heaven and Earth.
But as lonely, eager hate
possesses it, it disappears;
it never did exist,
and hate must seek another
world that love has made.

The poem reminds me of Satan’s soliloquy in Book IV of Paradise Lost. Gazing down at Eden and then up at the sun, Satan recalls the good old days when he was God’s archangel. It is his betrayal of his better self that fuels his anger. Addressing the sun, he tells how he “hate[s] thy beams,”

That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Sphere;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless King…

While ruminating, he realizes that it is resentment of God’s love that fuels his anger:

Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less then to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov’d ill in me,
And wrought but malice…

In the end, he embraces his hatred, even though he knows it is making him miserable:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep…

Trump has followers who, even as his policies make their lives harder, would rather suffer and hate than accept people unlike themselves. Their inner misery propels them to destroy worlds that love has made. Or as Satan says elsewhere in the poem, “For only in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts.” 

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On Watching Spring Come In

Claude Monet, Orchard in Spring

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Thursday – First Day of Spring

I celebrate our official entry into spring with Thomas Gray’s lovely “Ode on the Spring,” which is striking for its sensuous imagery. Novelist and essayist Iris Murdoch, who has observed that literature “is concerned with visual and auditory sensations and bodily sensations,” asserts that “if nothing sensuous is present, no art is present.” Gray’s poem is chockfull of visual and auditory sensations.

In the ode the poet is seated under an oak tree with his poetic muse—which means that he’s being poetically reflective—and concluding that he’s in exactly the right place. Far from “the ardor of the crowd” (or “the madding crowd,” as he calls it in his famous “Elegy on a Country Churchyard”), he sees how small the great are and how poor the wealthy. To borrow from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” he scorns to change his state with kings.

As peaceful as he is feeling, however, Gray is a depressive, which means he can’t stay content for long. After a few moments of basking in the shade and listening to a nearby stream (he compares himself to a reposing cow), he begins reflecting upon mortality. Gray, after all, is a poet who looks at an Eton rugby match and focuses on the rainstorm that is about to interrupt it. (“Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play,” he laments in one of the darkest passages in literature.) In this case, he thinks about how short-lived will be the busy insect life that is creeping and flying about him.

At first, everything is lovely.  “The insect youth are on the wing,” he exclaims, “Eager to taste the honied spring.” The very next thought, however, is how evanescent this all is. The various bugs may “flutter thro’ life’s little day,” he writes, but soon everything will come to an end: they will leave their “airy dance…in dust to rest.” Needless to say, he applies the observation to humans as well.

What he has missed, however, is how this gay and colorful assembly is living fully in the moment. “We frolic, while tis May,” the bugs inform him, a carpe diem reminder to focus on the present rather than the future. The contrast with his own life reminds him that he himself has little of color or sweetness. He is a “solitary fly” who lacks a “glitt’ring female.” “Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone,” he glumly concludes about himself.

So much for the peace that he has found earlier in the poem.

The images of the poem, however, offset his gloomy self-assessment. How can one possibly be somber when spring is busting out all over, releasing insects to “float amid the liquid noon,” skim lightly “o’er the current,” or show off “their gaily-gilded trim/ Quick-glancing to the sun.” While Mary Oliver, in her own close observation of insect life (a grasshopper), also reflects upon mortality (“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”), she lets the amazement of the moment overwhelm any darker thoughts. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do,” she writes in lines that have become a maxim for living, “with your one wild and precious life?”

So go seek out Gray’s tree or Oliver’s field of grass, throw yourself down, and lose yourself in the moment. You can worry about death at some other time.

Ode on the Spring
By Thomas Gray

Lo! where the rosy-bosom’d Hours,
Fair Venus’ train appear,
Disclose the long-expecting flowers,
And wake the purple year!
The Attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo’s note,
The untaught harmony of spring:
While whisp’ring pleasure as they fly,
Cool zephyrs thro’ the clear blue sky
Their gather’d fragrance fling.

Where’er the oak’s thick branches stretch
A broader, browner shade;
Where’er the rude and moss-grown beech
O’er-canopies the glade,
Beside some water’s rushy brink
With me the Muse shall sit, and think
(At ease reclin’d in rustic state)
How vain the ardour of the crowd,
How low, how little are the proud,
How indigent the great!

Still is the toiling hand of Care:
The panting herds repose:
Yet hark, how thro’ the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!
The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honied spring,
And float amid the liquid noon:
Some lightly o’er the current skim,
Some show their gaily-gilded trim
Quick-glancing to the sun.

To Contemplation’s sober eye
Such is the race of man:
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the busy and the gay
But flutter thro’ life’s little day,
In fortune’s varying colours drest:
Brush’d by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chill’d by age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.

Methinks I hear in accents low
The sportive kind reply:
Poor moralist! and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glitt’ring female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display:
On hasty wings thy youth is flown;
Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone—
We frolic, while ’tis May.

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Trumps Wants to “Kill All the Lawyers”

Insurrectionist Jack Cade

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Wednesday

We are at a treacherous point in Donald Trump’s attempted fascist takeover of American democracy, with an all-out assault on the rule of law underway. On the one hand, Trump is firing any government lawyer who will not do his bidding or whom he imagines, in the future, will oppose illegal or unconstitutional actions. On the other, he is going after lawyers who are representing his opponents and judges who are ruling against him in court. If he starts outrightly ignoring court orders—and he’s very close to having done so—we will have tilted over into outright dictatorship.

You undoubtedly have heard the Shakespeare quotation, “Kill all the lawyers.” What you may not know is that the line is delivered by a very Trumpian figure, a populist who beheads anyone who stands in his way. Like Trump and his minions, Jack Cade and Dick the Butcher also destroy documents necessary to the maintenance of civil society. I post today an excerpt from a talk that I first shared back in 2016 by a judge who explains the context of the quotation.  

U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash, who is married to a close childhood friend of mine and who was just in town, has written eloquently on the many times he has turned to Shakespeare to better administer the law. He concludes this excerpt of his talk to the Intellectual Property Law Institute with the observation, “We [lawyers] have a professional responsibility to speak out when the rule of law is threatened. We should be vigilant to warn against modern day Jack Cades.”

Following the January 6 coup attempt, I compared Trump to Jack Cade in Henry VI, Part II. I was able to do so because of the essay Tom had written five years before.

Excerpted from “Lessons in Professionalism” (delivered Sept. 16, 2016, by Thomas W. Thrash, Chief United States District Judge, Northern District of Georgia)

Let me begin by talking about the most famous statement by Shakespeare about lawyers, from Henry VI, Part 2: “First thing, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This is often quoted as a Dan Quayle like statement that there are too many lawyers, or that life would be better without having to have lawyers, or that lawyers are bad people.

In context, however, exactly the opposite is true. Henry VI, Part 2, is set in England in the late 15th century at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Henry VI is a weak and ineffectual king, and the nobles and great lords rule the country. England is in turmoil, with a charlatan named Jack Cade leading an armed mob of angry tenant farmers and tradesmen in a march on London with the aim of overthrowing the ruling elites and all of England’s legal and governmental institutions.

The statement about killing all the lawyers is made by Dick the Butcher, one of the leaders of the mob of anarchists. He wants to get rid of the lawyers because they are the defenders of the rule of law. Lawyers are defenders of a system of justice that curtails the arbitrary use of force. To me, recognizing our special role as defenders of the rule of law is an important aspect of professionalism.

Henry VI, Part 2 is rarely performed these days, which is a shame because it is a fine play. While I have never seen it performed in front of a live audience, I have read accounts by two Shakespearian scholars who have. Their experiences were identical. When Dick the Butcher says, “First thing, let’s kill all the lawyers” the audience laughs. This is a lawyer joke, right? Lawyer jokes are funny. But then Jack Cade follows is up with this:

Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

Then some of Cade’s men come in with the Clerk of Chatham:

Weaver: “The clerk of Chatham: he can write and read and cast accompt.
Cade: O monstrous! Here’s a villain!
Weaver: Has a book in his pocket with red letters in’t.
Cade: Nay, then, he is a conjurer.
Butcher: Nay, he can make obligations, and write court-hand.
Cade: Come hither, sirrah, I must examine thee: what is thy name?
Clerk: Emmanuel.
Cade: Dost thou use to write thy name? or hast thou a mark to thyself, like an honest plain-dealing man?
Clerk: Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.
All: He hath confessed: away with him! he’s a villain and a traitor.
Cade: Away with him, I say! hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck.

So Jack Cade and his mob hang the Clerk because he can read and write.

At this point in the live performances, the audiences get quiet and serious. Maybe this is not supposed to be funny. Then the mob kills Lord Stafford and marches on London, where Cade commands his followers to destroy the Inns of Court.

Cade: “So, sirs: now go some and pull down the Savoy, others to the inns of court; down with them all.
Butcher: I have a suit unto your lordship
Cade: Be it a lordship, thou shalt have it for that word.
 Butcher: Only that the laws of England may come out of your mouth.
 Cade: I have thought upon it, it shall be so. Away, burn all the records of the realm: my mouth shall be the parliament of England.

So all the lawyers will be killed and the Inns of Court will be destroyed so that no future lawyers may be trained. All property records are to be destroyed, as are all titles and class distinctions. Jack Cade’s words are now the law of England.

A messenger enters and announces the capture of Lord Say:

Messenger: My lord, a prize, a prize! here’s the Lord Say, which sold the towns in France; he that made us pay one and twenty fifteens, and one shilling to the pound, the last subsidy.
Cade: Well, he shall be beheaded for it ten times. Ah, thou say, thou serge, nay, thou buckram lord! Now art thou within point-blank of our jurisdiction regal…. Thou hast most traitorousl corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison; and because they could not read, thou hast hanged them; when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live. Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin.

When Lord Say pleads for his life, describing the good works that he has done during his lifetime, Cade responds:

Cade: Go, take him away, I say, and strike off his head presently; and then break into his son-in-law’s house, Sir James Cromer, and strike off his head, and bring them both upon two poles hither.
All: It shall be done.

Lord Say and his son-in-law are beheaded and their heads are stuck on long poles and paraded through the streets of London. At each street corner the severed heads are put together in a grotesque charade of a kiss.

By this time, the live audiences that had laughed at the lawyer joke are recoiling with horror at what is being done once the rule of law is overthrown.

Eventually, the mob is disbursed and Jack Cade is killed. Before then, however, Shakespeare has taught us an important lesson about the rule of law. As I said, I think that we have a professional responsibility to speak out when the rule of law is threatened. We should be vigilant to warn against modern day Jack Cades.

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On the Leopards Eating Faces Party

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Tuesday

“But this last privilege I still retain;/ Th’ oppressed and injured always may complain,” writes the abused wife in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.” There’s a lot of complaining going on right now by those who opposed Donald Trump and are now experiencing his wrath.

Others are looking for consolation in schadenfreude. When you yourself are suffering, there’s a temporary satisfaction to be gained in MAGA buyers’ remorse. They “fucked around and found out,” many bruised liberals are saying. Or FAFO, as the acronym goes.

Did Trump-supporting veterans really think that Trump was on their side? How about red-state Medicaid recipients, who are losing benefits, or West Virginia diabetes patients, who are seeing the cost of insulin shoot back up? Kamala Harris must wonder how they did not see this coming.

As someone, quoting from William Carlos Williams’s poem “At Kenneth Burke’s Place,” recently observed in the New Yorker, what we are seeing is “the rare occurrence of the expected.”

A New Yorker cartoon that is quickly becoming legendary has a large campaign sign of a wolf overlooking a field where sheep are grazing. “I am going to eat you,” proclaims the sign, to which a sheep responds admiringly, “He tells it like it is.”

An old Twitter joke is also making the rounds. In 2015 Adrian Bott tweeted, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

With jungle cats on my mind, I turn to my favorite leopard story, which is Rudyard Kipling’s “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” While it doesn’t provide too much insight into our current mess, I use the occasion to revisit Kipling’s Just So Stories, which I loved as a child. I also refashion the leopard story as a modern political parable.

The stories, published in 1902, are wonderfully rhythmic, which makes them great for reading aloud. Kipling frames them as bedtime tales told to his daughter Josephine (“Best Beloved”), and indeed my father read them to us when we were growing up and I read them to my own sons. Applying a Lamarckian approach to biology, Kipling invents fanciful explanations as to how animals and occasionally humans developed their biological traits.

The leopard story originates from the passage in Jeremiah 13:23, “Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.” Taking Jeremiah’s rhetorical question as a challenge, Kipling imagines a world in which Ethiopians were not always dark and leopards not always spotted. Once they presided over an all-white world.

Well, a sandy world anyway. Here’s Kipling:

IN the days when everybody started fair, Best Beloved, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt …where there was sand and sandy-colored rock and ‘sclusively tufts of sandy-yellowish grass. The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there; and they were ‘sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard, he was the ‘sclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest of them all—a greyish-yellowish catty-shaped kind of beast, and he matched the ‘sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish colour of the High Veldt to one hair. This was very bad for the Giraffe and the Zebra and the rest of them; for he would lie down by a ‘sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish stone or clump of grass, and when the Giraffe or the Zebra or the Eland or the Koodoo or the Bush-Buck or the Bonte-Buck came by he would surprise them out of their jumpsome lives.

The world changes, however—let’s say it becomes more racially and ethnically diverse—which comes as a blow to those who have been living comfortably atop the food chain:

After a long time—things lived for ever so long in those days—they learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard or an Ethiopian; and bit by bit—the Giraffe began it, because his legs were the longest—they went away from the High Veldt. They scuttled for days and days and days till they came to a great forest, ‘sclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows, and there they hid: and after another long time, what with standing half in the shade and half out of it, and what with the slippery-slidy shadows of the trees falling on them, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy, and the Eland and the Koodoo grew darker, with little wavy grey lines on their backs like bark on a tree trunk; and so, though you could hear them and smell them, you could very seldom see them, and then only when you knew precisely where to look. They had a beautiful time in the ‘sclusively speckly-spickly shadows of the forest, while the Leopard and the Ethiopian ran about over the ‘sclusively greyish-yellowish-reddish High Veldt outside, wondering where all their breakfasts and their dinners and their teas had gone. At last they were so hungry that they ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits, the Leopard and the Ethiopian, and then they had the Big Tummy-ache, both together…

In my modern retelling, I must depart from the story here since there’s no way in hell that the GOP is interested in doing what Kipling’s Ethiopian does:

“The long and the little of it is that we don’t match our backgrounds… and as I’ve nothing to change except my skin I’m going to change that.’

‘What to?’ said the Leopard, tremendously excited.

‘To a nice working blackish-brownish colour, with a little purple in it, and touches of slaty-blue. It will be the very thing for hiding in hollows and behind trees.’

After undertaking his own transformation, the Ethiopian then dips his hands in the leftover pigment and, with the tips of his five fingers, imprints spots all over the leopard’s skin.

There was a time when the GOP considered “changing its skin.” George W. Bush prominently exhibited his Spanish skills to appeal to Latino voters, and from 2007-2009 African American Michael Steele served as the chairman of the GOP Action Committee (GOPAC). Since Trump, however, Republicans have doubled down on their identity as a “sclusively sandy-yellowish” party. As Jeremiah would put it, they are not prepared to do good when they are accustomed to doing evil.

But even if he’s not willing to change his kin, Trump—as a consummate salesman—convinced enough of the giraffes, zebras, elands, koodoos, bushbucks and bone bucks that he felt their pain and shared their concerns. In a razor thin election that came down to margins, he received a higher-than-expected portion of the vote from Latinos, Asian Americans, and Arab Americans. Whether because they worried about the price of eggs or because they dreamed of joining America’s racial caste system, enough of them chose not to vote for Kamala Harris to put Trump back in office.

And ever since (so Kipling’s story goes) the Ethiopian and the leopard have been feasting quite happily on the other animals.

Perhaps they even go on to establish a Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

Added note: I recently read Sylvia Garcia-Moreno’s The Daughter of Doctor Monroe, a spinoff of the H.G. Wells novel, where we see South America’s leopard equivalent actually eating someone’s face. The daughter is a woman-jaguar hybrid and, in a revenge fantasy moment, she takes a lethal bite out of the visage of a man bent on raping her.

I am woman, hear me roar. A number of American women are feeling this way these days.

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Flowers for St. Patrick’s Day

Irish peat blog flowers

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Monday – St. Patrick’s Day

For St. Patrick’s Day, here’s Patrick Kavanagh’s “The One,” about simple flowers blooming in a cut-away bog (where peat has been cut) in rural County Monaghan. Kavanagh grew up there, and although he was anxious to escape—which he did—the memory of the flowers returned to him years later.

I first was introduced to Kavanagh’s poetry when I came across a collection of his poems in a used Dublin bookstore. I became fixated on his lyrics, reading them obsessively as we traveled to Belfast and Magherafelt in search of Julia’s family roots.

Although Kavanagh for the most part isn’t that sentimental a poet, this poem seems an exception. It’s Wordsworthian in the way that it focuses on anonymous flowers in a humble setting. One thinks of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways,” where Wordsworth compares a woman he has met to “a violet by a mossy stone/ Half hidden from the eye!”

In any event, reading “The One” seems a good way to celebrate Ireland’s national holiday.

The One
By Patrick Kavanagh

Green, blue, yellow and red –
God is down in the swamps and marshes
Sensational as April and almost incred-
ible the flowering of our catharsis.
A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has balked
The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,
A violent wild iris – but mostly anonymous performers
Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet
Prepared to inform the local farmers
That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.

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God’s Wonders in Appalachia

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Sunday

Our church this year has been hosting a weekly lecture series for Adult Sunday School entitled “This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home.” The phrase is taken from a prayer of thanksgiving, sometimes humorously called “the Star Trek Prayer,” which reads, “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanses of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile Earth, our island home.” Whenever I hear it, I think of Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot,” which shows the earth as a microscopic speck lost in space when photographed by Voyager 1 in 1990.

The series has drawn liberally from Sewanee College’s environmental studies faculty. As we’ve been introduced to everything from the flora and fauna of our Appalachian plateau to the intricacies of the human cellular structure, I find myself shaking my head at creation’s marvels. The more science discovers, the more wondrous it seems. “And God saw that it was good” would strike us as an understatement were it not God that was making the assessment.

I’ve already contributed one talk to the series—”Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a Christmas Tale”—and today I will discuss “The Environmental Vision of Barbara Kingsolver.” In today’s post I share that part of my talk that deals with how, in Flight Behavior, Kingsolver finds room for an environmental consciousness within a Christian fundamentalist congregation.

Such congregations are often “dominionist”—which is to say, they focus on human domination of the environment. Many of Trump’s Christian supporters appear to have no problem with his desire to “drill, baby, drill,” to give away the national parks to mineral companies, and to clearcut the nation’s forests. There are a couple of these Christians within Kingsolver’s novel.

When climate change shifts a large monarch population from Central America to the Tennessee mountains, however, religion trumps capitalism in unexpected ways. I borrow from a previous post on the book to describe how, when God’s glory takes the form of millions of gorgeous butterflies, some disciples of Christ begin to part ways with disciples of Mammon.

The novel begins with the feisty protagonist, Dellarobia, on her way up a mountain to commit adultery, even though she’s aware that it will blow up her marriage. Suddenly, however, she encounters a great brightness, which stops her in her tracks. As she is not wearing her glasses, she doesn’t know that climate change and giant landslides have forced monarch butterflies to relocate. To her, the butterflies resemble a forest fire without the heat or the noise. While not particularly religious, she turns to the Bible for ways to express the moment:

A small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The forest blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense. The sun slipped out by another degree, passing its warmth across the land, and the mountain seemed to explode with light. Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave like the disturbed surface of a lake. Every bough glowed with an orange blaze. “Jesus God,” she said again. No words came to her that seemed sane. Trees turned to fire, a burning bush. Moses came to mind, and Ezekiel, words from Scripture that occupied a certain space in her brain but no longer carried honest weight, if they ever had. Burning coals of fire went up and down among the living creatures.

 For the record, here’s the complete passage from Ezekiel (1:4-14):

As I looked, behold, a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing forth continually and a bright light around it, and in its midst something like glowing metal in the midst of the fire. Within it there were figures resembling four living beings. And this was their appearance: they had human form. Each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight and their feet were like a calf’s hoof, and they gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides were human hands. As for the faces and wings of the four of them, their wings touched one another; their faces did not turn when they moved, each went straight forward. As for the form of their faces, each had the face of a man; all four had the face of a lion on the right and the face of a bull on the left, and all four had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. Their wings were spread out above; each had two touching another being, and two covering their bodies. And each went straight forward; wherever the spirit was about to go, they would go, without turning as they went. In the midst of the living beings there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches darting back and forth among the living beings. The fire was bright, and lightning was flashing from the fire. And the living beings ran to and fro like bolts of lightning.

Dellarobia believes that she has received a sign:

This was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.

She does not believe the sign is from God, however. Her view of God does not acknowledge God’s care for the sparrow, and her thinking reveals her low self-esteem:

By no means was she important enough for God to conjure signs and wonders on her account.

Nevertheless, Dellarobia has a “road to Damascus” experience, and she determines to turn her life around:

She could save herself. Herself and her children with their soft cheeks and milky breath who believed in what they had even if their whole goodness and mercy was a mother distracted out of her mind. It was not too late to undo this mess. Walk down the mountain, pick up those kids. The burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she’d ever know, and still she felt sure of it.

The vision can’t only be for herself. Her father-in-law, a money-grubbing farmer named Bear, is prepared to irresponsibly clear-cut the timber, and Dellarobia must keep him from doing so. Without admitting that she has been up the mountain (which would reveal her adultery plans), she suggests to her husband that he check out the forest first. When he and his parents discover the butterflies, they become convinced that God has sent her a vision. They receive further confirmation of this when she appears to be visited by the Holy Spirit. The passage evokes John’s baptism of Jesus:

She raised her eyes to the sky instead, and that made the others look up too, irresistibly led, even Bear. Together they saw light streaming through glowing wings. Like embers, she thought, a flood of fire, the warmth they had craved so long. She felt her breathing rupture again into laughter or sobbing on her chest, sharp, vocal exhalations she couldn’t contain. The sounds coming out of her veered toward craziness.

The two older men stepped back as if she’d slapped them.

“Lord almighty, the girl is receiving grace,” said Hester, and Dellarobia could not contradict her.

The following day Dellarobia’s husband announces to the church congregation that she has had a vision, much to her embarrassment.

The battle is not yet won, however, as Bear is determined to use illegal DDT to wipe out the butterflies, which would otherwise clog the machinery of “Trees for Money. It takes the intervention of the pastor, who believes the butterflies are a sign from God, to finally save them. The intervention includes

–specially chosen hymns (“The earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord”);

–a specially tailored sermon (“May we look to these mountains that are Your home and see You are in everything. The earth is the Lord in the fullness thereof.”)

–a family conference in which the pastor speaks directly to the issue (“What I hear you saying is you want to log the mountain because it’s yours, and because you can. And my job here I think is to warn you about the sin of pride.”)

Bear’s family further pressures him, which takes a great deal of courage. First there’s his son Cub:

That’s true, Dad. When a man is greedy and gets too big for his britches, he pays for that. You’ve seen that.

Then Bear’s Wife wades in:

If you can’t live by the laws the Lord God made for this world, they’ll go into effect regardless….That land was bestowed on us for a purpose. And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.

Finally, after Bear calls the pastor a “tree hugger,” the pastor replies,

Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?

Bear finally capitulates and the pastor leads the family in prayer.

Kingsolver is neither religious nor unreligious. She does, however, have a spiritual vision of nature, and her book shows how the local culture uses its Baptist world view to process what is happening. In this instance, the forces of Mammon are routed.

I don’t know how hopeful to be from Kingsolver’s depiction. I know that, in my own section of Appalachia, a sand company has just gotten a permit to set up a large sand quarry, which will despoil hundreds of acres, with no opposition from local government (despite local resistance) and with few environmental checks. My neighbors are concerned about the impact on their wells and on the groundwater in general. In this heavily Baptist area, they are dismissed as leftie tree huggers.

Kingsolver is respected around here, however, with Tennesseans seeing themselves in works like Prodigal Summer, Demon Copperhead, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as well as Flight Behavior. Perhaps the novels can help open people’s eyes to what we stand to lose.

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Trump Christians and Child Abuse

From Oliver Goldsmith, “Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog”

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Friday

In a drearily predictable development, another Trump-supporting pastor has been indicted for child abuse. Robert Morris, founder of the Gateway Church in Southill, Texas and one-time member of Trump’s first-term spiritual advisory team, has admitted to “kissing and petting” a 12-year old girl when he was 21. The abuse continued for four years.

Sanctimonious Christians who declaim against liberals, it seems, are always the ones most likely to violate basic tenets of decency. The more fervently they uphold “traditional Christian values,” the greater the odds that they are violating them in private.

Which leads me to Oliver Goldsmith’s comic poem “Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,” which features a sanctimonious man of God. To establish his godly credentials, the poem tells us that he ran “a godly race” whenever he went to pray and that

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad—
When he put on his clothes.

 This man is contrasted with an abject sinner—a cur “of low degree”—which everyone looks down upon.  It is clear that this dog is a reprobate when he bites “so good a man.”

The real toxicity lies elsewhere, however—as becomes clear in the poem’s unexpected conclusion. Goldsmith might be drawing on Jesus’s parable about the smug pharisee and the breast-beating tax collector in structuring his lyric: “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus contends (Luke 18:9-14):

An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
By Oliver Goldsmith

Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.

In Islington there was a man
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran—
Whene’er he went to pray.

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad—
When he put on his clothes.

And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.

This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.

Around from all the neighboring streets
The wond’ring neighbors ran,
And swore the dog had lost its wits
To bite so good a man.

The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.

But soon a wonder came to light
That showed the rogues they lied,—
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died!

A poem that Trump used to share with audiences was another lyric about biting, this one about a woman who saves a snake from dying. She is rewarded for her generous act with a death bite:

“I saved you,” cried that woman
“And you’ve bitten me even, heavens why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die”

“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin
“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!

. While, for Trump, the snake is a stand-in for immigrant “racists and murderers,” it’s clear to any objective observer that the real poisonous snake is Trump himself. America has twice taken him into the Oval Office, where he has done far more damage than anyone crossing the border.

Jesus was suspicious of people who loudly proclaim their holiness while judging and condemning others. In his vision, the curs of low degree will inherit the kingdom of heaven.

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