Tolstoy, Must Reading for Economists

By Robin Bates | Published: September 9, 2024
Leo Tolstoy

Tuesday

A Nick Romeo article in the latest New Yorker makes a compelling case that economists should be reading literature. Or at least they should be reading Leo Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” a short story about a peasant-turned-land owner who spends so much energy trying to amass ever more property that he ends up killing himself.

In the end, the amount he needs is a “six feet from head to his heels”—which is to say, enough to bury him in.

Here’s the situation. The man, who starts off as a poor peasant but finds ways to steadily amass wealth and land, comes upon what seems like an incredible deal: for the tiny price of 1000 rubles, he can have as much land as he can cover in a day of walking. But as the chief of the tribe tells him,  “there is one condition: If you don’t return on the same day to the spot whence you started, your money is lost.”

You can imagine what happens next. Every time that the man prepares to return to that original spot, he sees another desirable plot that he can’t imagine not having. All of which leads to this:

Pahom looked at the sun, which had reached the earth: one side of it had already disappeared. With all his remaining strength he rushed on, bending his body forward so that his legs could hardly follow fast enough to keep him from falling. Just as he reached the hillock it suddenly grew dark. He looked up–the sun had already set. He gave a cry: “All my labor has been in vain,” thought he, and was about to stop, but he heard the Bashkirs still shouting, and remembered that though to him, from below, the sun seemed to have set, they on the hillock could still see it. He took a long breath and ran up the hillock. It was still light there. He reached the top and saw the cap. Before it sat the Chief laughing and holding his sides. Again Pahom remembered his dream, and he uttered a cry: his legs gave way beneath him, he fell forward and reached the cap with his hands.

“Ah, what a fine fellow!” exclaimed the Chief. “He has gained much land!”

Pahom’s servant came running up and tried to raise him, but he saw that blood was flowing from his mouth. Pahom was dead!

Why is this essential reading for economists? Romeo explains that our view of economics has become so distorted that we’ve all become Pahoms. While economists like Maynard Keynes once believed that “many major topics of economics are inescapably moral and political” and that “a master-economist” must be “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher,” that changed in the 1950s. That’s when Milton Friedman argued that economics could be “an ‘objective’ science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences.” As a result, ethical and political questions were sidelined and economists began deploying “a technocratic, quasi-scientific vocabulary.”

 “From this perspective,” Romeo writes, “the moral evaluations of Keynes, Tolstoy, or anyone else are irrelevant.”

I note in passing that something comparable happened to literary criticism in the 1950s. Instead of looking at how, say, literature can enrich and improve our lives, the formalist critics focused on studying texts the way scientists study natural phenomena. Morality and moral impact appeared irrelevant.

The result of stripping morality out of economics has been severe. The “pose of scientific impartiality,” Romeo writes,

allows mainstream economists to smuggle all sorts of dubious claims—that economic growth requires high inequality, that increasing corporate concentration is inevitable, or that people can only be motivated to work by desperation—into policy and discourse. This becomes an excuse for maintaining the status quo, which is presented as the result of inevitable and immutable “laws.” In the famous phrase of Margaret Thatcher, “There is no alternative.”

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Romeoo says that we can marry economics and morality

by adopting economic models and policies that give tangible reality to the otherwise empty platitude that a better world is possible. Initiatives such as participatory budgeting, climate budgeting, job guarantees, employee ownership, true prices, genuine living wages, a public utility-style job market for irregular labor, less dogmatic economics education and new investment-capital models that decrease wealth inequality are all powerful elements of a more just and sustainable economy.

Romeo adds that all of these already exist. “There’s no stronger response to charges of utopianism,” he declares, “than showing models that are already working.”

One of the values of a liberal arts education is that students are required to leave disciplinary silos and make connections across disciplines. Having economics majors read Tolstoy is one way to get them to grapple with the moral dimensions of their specialty, just as having literature majors take economics forces them to grapple with how money works. Everyone benefits.

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Drought in Climate Fiction

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2024
The current Australian drought may be worst in 800 years

Monday

Although we’re not hearing much about climate change in this year’s election, global warming is not going away. Last week Phoenix extended its record-setting pace of consecutive days over 100ºF (37.78ºC), with the 100th day clocking in at 111ºF (43.89ºC). I am put in mind of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, where we see a group of people journeying out into space because earth has become uninhabitable.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel within a novel, with Doerr having made up a work of fantasy by 2nd century Greek author Antonius Diogenes (who himself is real). Diogenes wrote a novel, The Wonders Beyond Thule, but it is has been lost to time. All we have is a synopsis of it by another writer.

The novel that Doerr imagines Diogenes to have written is a comic account of a man who wants to be transformed into a bird so that he can visit a bird utopia in the clouds—but who, through a series of mishaps, is instead transformed first into a much-abused ass and then into a hunted fish. We see the work survive the fall of Constantinople, make its way to Italy and the Vatican library, get performed by school children in 20th century Idaho, and then bolster a 22nd century girl, who is the sole survivor of a viral outbreak on the spaceship .

For his account of climate change’s impact, Doerr has drawn on Bill McKibben’s book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? In the case of space traveler Konstance, prolonged drought has destroyed her father’s family farm. With nothing else to do as she barrels through space, she begins researching the Diogenes novel to figure out how it got into the hands of her father and through him to her. The ship’s computer, operating like an advanced Siri with access to all the world’s libraries, shows her images of the drought-stricken landscape that her father left behind:

The Earth flies toward her, inverts, the southern hemisphere pivoting as it rushes closer, and she drops from the sky onto a road line with eucalyptus. Bronze hills bake in the distance; white fencing runs down both sides. A trio of faded banners, strung overhead, reads,

DO YOUR PART
DEFEAT DAY ZERO
YOU CAN DO WITH 10 LITRES A DAY

As the computer takes her to the family homestead, she sees the damage that the drought has wrought: “Only one green year in the past thirteen.” The sight of the ravaged farm helps her better understand her father’s decision to leave:

Her father applied to join the crew when he was twelve, advanced through the application process for a year. At age thirteen—the same age Konstance is now—he would have received the call. Surely he understood that he would never live long enough to reach Beta Oph2? That he would spend the resto of his life inside a machine. Yet he left anyway.

It’s a fantasy to think that space travel will save us from ourselves, as Doerr’s book makes clear. It’s either this world or nothing. Or as Frost puts it, “Earth’s the right place for love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

I won’t spoil the novel by talking about what happens next. What I loved about Cloud Cuckoo Land is the way that a work of literature—and a comic one at that—can have a profound impact throughout the centuries. Doerr’s shows his novel within his novel providing solace to a little girl  in the final days of Constantinople, helping her develop a relationship with an Ottoman ox-cart driver (who saves her from slavery), rejuvenating a lonely homosexual living in rural Idaho, keeping up the morale of Idaho school children when they are endangered by an eco-terrorist, and supporting an orphan in outer space.

As an added bonus, Cloud Cuckoo Land is yet another literary warning about the threat posed by climate change, joining such works as Margaret Atwood’s Oryk and Crake trilogy, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

Further thought: It so happens that as I was writing today’s post, reader Patty R sent me an article about Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, in which appears a passage that applies to Doerr imagining what Diogenes might have written. Thomasina is heartbroken when she learns about all the books that were lost when the fabled library of Alexandria burned down but her tutor offers him some comfort:  

Thomasina: Oh Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?”\

Septimus: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, and nineteen from Euripedes, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.

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My Heart Was in My Knees, but No Hearing

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2024
Bosch, St Jerome in Prayer

Sunday

The weather seems to have finally changed, and as I look at the fading flowers on our deck, I think of George Herbert’s description of himself as a nipped blossom hanging discontented.

“Denial” is one of many poems in which the poet laments his inability to experience God’s presence. Although he wears out his knees praying, the poet says, God does not appear to hear him. Instead, like the stricken flower or like an untuned and unstrung instrument that lies forgotten in a corner, Herbert feels abandoned, his breast “full of fear and disorder.”

Among the multiple metaphors he uses for his disconsolate state is a brittle bow that flies asunder when the archer draws it back, with the arrow going who knows where. We’ve all experienced those moments when we cannot focus our mind—“the monkey mind,” some call it– and Herbert reports that some of his “bent thoughts” “would to pleasures go,/ Some to the wars and thunder/ Of alarms.” In other words, sometimes he is distracted by illicit desires, sometimes by various worries.” I can certainly relate.

On Herbert’s use of the bow metaphor, it’s useful to remember that the word “sin,” as used by both the Hebrews and the Greeks, was originally an archery term meaning to miss the mark. The poet’s words are not hitting their mark, although the poet partly accuses God for the problem. Herbert’s devotions cannot pierce God’s silent ears.

Why should God “give dust a tongue” and then refuse to hear the tongue crying out, Herbert wonders despairingly and perhaps even angrily.

Having so vented, however, the poet concludes by assuring us that his untuned, unstrung instrument has been mended and that he can finally be at one with the divine. Perhaps we need to vent a bit before we can get right with God, which is certainly the theme of Herbert’s well-known poem “The Collar.”

In any event, each stanza of “Denial” until the last one has ended on a discordant note, with the final word landing like a wrong note, rhyming with nothing that has come before. The last stanza, however, ends with a rhyming couplet, like a chord resolving itself. God has answered the poet’s request.

Denial
By George Herbert

When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears,
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse;
My breast was full of fears
And disorder.

My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow,
Did fly asunder:
Each took his way; some would to pleasures go,
Some to the wars and thunder
Of alarms.

“As good go anywhere,” they say,
“As to benumb
Both knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come, come, my God, O come!
But no hearing.”

O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To cry to thee,
And then not hear it crying! All day long
My heart was in my knee,
But no hearing.

Therefore my soul lay out of sight,
Untuned, unstrung:
My feeble spirit, unable to look right,
Like a nipped blossom, hung
Discontented.

O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favors granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhyme.

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“Dinas Vawr” and Bully Culture

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2024
Dinas Vawr’s Victory

Friday

For all the upbeat news about Kamala Harris’s surge, I’ve been hearing one note of caution: Trump this time is poised to pick up votes of many young men who, in 2020, elected for Joe Biden. There’s something about Trump’s performance of dominance masculinity that ropes in a distressing large number of these people.

A columnist for The Bulwark, a publication run by former Republicans who have fled their party, describes the thinking as follows:

Facts and evidence don’t matter. A decent respect for our fellow citizens doesn’t matter. The nativism is the point. The prejudice is the point. The bigotry is the point. The cruelty is the point. The slander is the point.

Thom Hartmann, who runs the Substack column The Hartmann Report, says that America at the moment has been overtaken by an epidemic of bullying, set off and exploited by Donald Trump. For the first time in American history, Hartmann writes,

we’re learning what other countries that suffered under authoritarian bullies know: the damage runs deep, tears communities and families apart, and spawns its own mini-industry of strutting militia-type bullies intent on emulating dear leader.

Harmann mentions “Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, you name it.” The groups, he says are “mostly made up of men deeply insecure about their own masculinity or role in the world who find safety and meaning by joining the über-bully’s gang.”

The effect of such bullying, he goes on to lament, is that it has “drained many of us of our hope and optimism, much as it did in the 1950s when Joe McCarthy last led a national bullying campaign.” Ten years of Trumpian bullying, he contends, causes people “to check out of the political process, to essentially give up like an abused spouse, or to retreat into sports, music, and hours of binge-watched TV dramas.”

I get insights into the thrill bullies feel when I read Thomas Love Peacock’s “The War-song of Dinas Vawr.” The poem once seemed so over-the-top to me that I found it funny, what with its outrageous female rhymes (where the rhyme falls on the next to last syllable) and casual, unapologetic sadism. I get that it’s meant to be a comic parody of warrior culture.

I don’t find it so funny now that I see people actually imagining their own updated versions of this conquest fantasy. While “owning the libs” and taking down the elites may seem like entertainment tv, there will be horrific real-life consequences if Trump is reelected.

But who cares as long as you’re feasting and singing?

The War-song of Dinas Vawr
By Thomas Love Peacock

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;
But we conquered them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewild’ring,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

Peacock meant the poem as a joke, and it is. That is, until it isn’t.

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Silko and Trump on Weaving

By Robin Bates | Published: September 4, 2024
Navajo rug

Wednesday

So after years of Donald Trump periodically citing various experts in support of his actions (whom he never names), he has finally gotten around to my profession. Apparently English professors are telling him that his rambling talks are “the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” I guess this means we professors are putting his stream-of-consciousness gibberish—what he calls “the weave”—up there with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

I’ll share his quote in a moment, along with how my own mind has woven together our current political situation and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony. But before I go on, let me reassure readers that this post will be less about Trump’s inanities and more about mending the torn fabric of our nation. I believe, on the basis of what Silko says about the healing process, that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have the potential to make some significant progress in that endeavor.

To start us off, here’s Trump’s quote:

I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together. And friends of mine who are, like, English professors, they say: “That’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen!” But the fake news, you know what they say? “He rambled.” It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject, mention another little tidbit, then you get back onto the subject. And you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.

First, I doubt seriously that Trump has any English professor friends. (It’s an open question whether he has any friends at all but put that aside.) Second, while it’s true that the musings of Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway are all over the map, they are engaging in private thoughts, not public performances. Neither one, when talking to someone else, would deliver anything comparable to the following, voiced during a recent Trump rally:

You take a look at bacon and some of these products. Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.

John Stoehr of the blog Editorial Board, drawing on first-hand experience with a close family member, believes that Trump’s “weaving” is a sign of dementia, with his denials an attempt to hide it. “He knows he’s rambling so he covers it up saying he’s not rambling,” Stoehr contends before adding,  

He must prove it’s not happening. He does this by repeating himself. It’s as if the sheer volume of verbosity will make it real. It’s as if getting us to believe he’s still big and strong and tough will stop the inevitable.

Silko sees herself as a weaver of stories, transcribing what “Thought-Woman, the spider” puts in her head. What initially put me on to Ceremony was Silko’s own description of out-of-control stream of consciousness. In her case, she’s describing the PTSD thoughts of Tayo, a World War II veteran who has seen Rocky, his cousin and best friend, killed when the Japanese held them captive. Early in the novel, Silko uses the metaphor of tangled threads to capture his state of mind:

He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child, and he had carried them outside to play and they had spilled out of his arms into the summer weeds and rolled away in all directions, and then he had hurried to pick them up before Aunti found him. He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads beingp ulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. So Tayo had to sweat through those nights when thoughts became entangled; he had to sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or tied in knots to the past…

Later, when Tayo goes to the local medicine man searching for healing, we learn about the fragility of a weave, in this case a spider’s early morning web:

“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.”

The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the story for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way.

We also learn about how easily those threads can be destroyed:

The old man only made him certain of something he had feared all along, something in the old stories. It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured.

From the start of his first presidential campaign, Trump has been tearing apart norms and institutions, most notably the peaceful transition of power, respect for military veterans, respect for the rule of law, and, recently, the rituals of Arlington National Cemetery. Nothing to him is sacred. Indeed, the line describing Big Jim in Bob Dylan’s “Jack of Hearts” often comes to me when I think of Trump:

With his bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place
He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste

I promised you a more positive turn to this post so here it is. Tayo is on a healing quest—for himself and for the world—and he searches for a pattern that will address the sickness that has set humans against the environment, Whites against Indians, and Indians against Indians. In the end, he finds it in an inner peace that refuses to get drawn into the world’s hatred, anger, and fear, what Silko calls witchery. It’s like the way that Harris insists on joy and hope in the face of Trump’s racism and misogyny.

This peace is captured in beautiful patterns that one finds in Pueblo blankets and Navajo sand paintings. Ultimately Tayo finds that pattern in the stars:

Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them. 

It so happens that the witchery does in fact collapse in upon itself as the forces seeking to destroy Tayo, baffled by his refusal to engage with them, instead turn on each other. I wonder if something similar will eventually happen to Trump and Trumpism. The racists and fascists that Trump has emboldened have already destroyed the traditional GOP. Will they eventually cannibalize each other? Silko concludes the novel with the following poem:

Whirling darkness
started its journey
with its witchery
and
its witchery
has returned upon it.

Its witchery
has returned
into its belly.

Its own witchery
has returned
all around it.

Whirling darkness
has come back on itself.
It keeps all its witchery
to itself.

It doesn’t open its eyes
with its witchery.

It has stiffened
with the effects of its own witchery.

It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.

And then, on the last page:

Sunrise,
accept this offering,
Sunrise.

Or as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it in his speech at the Democratic National Convention:

[W]eeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. We’ve endured January 6th. We’ve endured conspiracy theories. We’ve endured lies and areas of darkness. But if we stay together, Black, White, Latina, Asian, Indian American, if we stay together, joy, joy, joy, joy coming in the morning.

Believe it.

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The Bard on How to Drive Dramatically

By Robin Bates | Published: September 3, 2024

Wednesday

For a humorous interlude, I share today a post I encountered on Spoutible that was triggered by someone offering driving advice. (I don’t know who started the thread.) Apparently some official somewhere asserted that “obeying the rules when you drive dramatically reduces your chances of crashing,” leading this wag to wonder what it in fact meant to “drive dramatically.” Could it, he or she wondered, involve quoting Shakespeare as one negotiates traffic? And if so, which passages would one turn to?

Responders weighed in with several creative answers, to which I’ve added several more. Feel free to send in your own.

You can use this as a quiz as well. Can you identify the original passage in each instance? (Answers at the end)

1. Is this a red light I see before me?!

2. Forsooth, yonder light is rendered green. And yet thou dost tarry! Shall I produce such a sound as to wake you from your slumber?

3. What light through yonder windscreen breaks? Is it the amber, and my brake pedal the sun!

4. Alfa Romeo, Alfa Romeo, wherefore art thou parked Alfa Romeo?

And now my own contributions:

5. Hell is empty and all the traffic is here!

6. Lord, what fools these others drivers be!

7. The first thing we do, let’s kill all the traffic cops.

8. The devil can cite traffic law to his purpose.

9. I wish my car had the speed of your tongue!

10. Beware the Ides of March—especially if it falls on a weekday between 4-7 and you’re trying to exit Atlanta.

Answer key:
1. Macbeth
2. I’m thinking a combination of Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream
3. Romeo and Juliet
4. Romeo and Juliet
5. The Tempest
6. Midsummer Night’s Dream
7. Henry VI, Part II
8. Merchant of Venice
9. Much Ado about Nothing
10. Julius Caesar

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Candide on Trump as God’s Messenger

By Robin Bates | Published: September 2, 2024
Trump following assassination attempt

Tuesday

According to the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, Donald Trump surviving an assassin’s bullet has elevated him to messiah status amongst certain of his evangelical supporters. One of the problems of such reasoning was voiced by Voltaire 265 years ago.

In his article, Bump reports that some supporters in Congress and on social media

have shared Bible scriptures and illustrations showing the Holy Ghost deflecting the bullet. Internet celebrities such as boxer Jake Paul have called the moment proof of “who God wants to win,” and posters on TheDonald, a far-right message board unaffiliated with Trump, have mentioned God seven times as often as they did in the week before the shooting, a Washington Post analysis found.

Trump, as they see him, has been anointed by God to save a troubled nation, and apparently Trump is in agreement. Here’s what he had to say in a recent television interview with Dr. Phil (McGraw):

“Is there a reason you think you were spared?” McGraw asked.

“I mean, the only thing I can think is that God loves our country,” Trump replied. “And he thinks we’re going to bring our country back. He wants to bring it back.”

“You believe God’s hand was in this that day?” McGraw asked a bit later in the discussion.

“I believe so, yeah, I do,” Trump replied.

“And you talk about the country; you believe you have more to do,” McGraw followed up. “You weren’t done. You were spared for a reason.”

“Well,” Trump said, “God believes that.”

Bump then raises the objection that Voltaire voiced in his satire Candide. Why, he asks, did firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was struck by one of the bullets, have to die? He adds wryly that the question went unaddressed by McGraw or Trump.

It does not go unaddressed in Candide. In Voltaire’s scorching satire, a Dutch sea captain has just robbed Candide of many of the jewels he acquired in El Dorado:

Candide followed in a little boat to join the vessel in the roads. The skipper seized his opportunity, set sail, and put out to sea, the wind favoring him. Candide, dismayed and stupefied, soon lost sight of the vessel.

“Alas!” said he, “this is a trick worthy of the old world!”

It so happens, however, that Candide, upon booking a second ship, comes upon a sea battle where a Spanish vessel is attacking the ship of the thief. He watches as the ship goes down, along with “the immense plunder which this villain had amassed.” Candide sees the same hand of providence at work that Trump’s evangelical supporters saw in his case:

“You see,” said Candide to Martin, “that crime is sometimes punished. This rogue of a Dutch skipper has met with the fate he deserved.”

To which Martin asks, “But why should the passengers be doomed also to destruction?

Seeking his own explanatory framework, Martin comes up with one which appears to let God somewhat off the hook: “God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.”

This actually sounds like Trumpian reasoning: Trump takes credit for whatever goes right while finding ways to blame others for whatever goes wrong.

In any event, as a supreme egotist, Trump unsurprisingly takes it for granted that God would single him out to save. As for Comperatore, I doubt he has given him a second thought.

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Celebrate Work? or Complain about It?

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2024
Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson in Mad Men

Monday – Labor Day

When it comes to my Labor Day post, I always face the question of whether my literary selection should celebrate labor or relief from labor. Frequently I think of the passage in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where narrator Marlow shares his mixed feelings about work. In this instance, the work involves refitting the boat that will take him into the Congo to retrieve Kurtz:

She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

One finds a very different view of work in Jenny Diver’s violent revenge fantasy in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s Three Penny Opera. The fantasy, which helps Jenny endure her hard life, starts with her venting her frustrations:

You people can watch while I’m scrubbing these floors
And I’m scrubbin’ the floors while you’re gawking
Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell
In this crummy southern town
In this crummy old hotel
But you’ll never guess to who you’re talkin’.
No. you couldn’t ever guess to who you’re talkin’.

And then “one night there’s a scream in the night” as a ghostly black freighter sails into the harbor. The ship’s cannons level all the building except for the hotel, and the only one who knows why is Jenny, whom the others see “grinnin’ while I’m scrubbin’.” The mystery is solved the next morning when they see her stepping out, “looking nice with a ribbon in my hair”:

And the ship
The black freighter
Runs a flag up its masthead
And a cheer rings the air

By noontime the dock
Is a-swarmin’ with men
Comin’ out from the ghostly freighter
They move in the shadows
Where no one can see
And they’re chainin’ up people
And they’re bringin’ em to me
Askin’ me,
“Kill them now, or later?”
Askin’ me!
“Kill them now, or later?”

Noon by the clock
And so still by the dock
You can hear a foghorn miles away
And in that quiet of death
I’ll say, “right now.
Right now!”

Then they’ll pile up the bodies
And I’ll say,
“That’ll learn ya!”

And the ship
The black freighter
Disappears out to sea
And
On
It
Is
Me

Brecht does not see women as sweet, soft, and sentimental angels ready to forgive. (Neither does Margaret Atwood, come to think of it—I’ve just reread Blind Assassin and see her rebelling against the same stereotype.)

Marge Piercy’s “Secretary’s Chant,” today’s featured poem, is closer to Jenny’s vision than Marlow’s (although it lacks the revenge fantasy).  There’s nothing noble or self-revelatory about how the job takes over the speaker’s identity, prompting her to see herself as an anonymous cog in the corporate structure. “File me under W,” she says—she might as well say, “Bury me”– “because I wonce was a woman.”

The Secretary Chant
By Marge Piercy

My hips are a desk,
From my ears hang
chains of paper clips.
Rubber bands form my hair.
My breasts are quills of
mimeograph ink.
My feet bear casters,
Buzz. Click.
My head is a badly organized file.
My head is a switchboard
where crossed lines crackle.
Press my fingers
and in my eyes appear
credit and debit.
Zing. Tinkle.
My navel is a reject button.
From my mouth issue canceled reams.
Swollen, heavy, rectangular
I am about to be delivered
of a baby
Xerox machine.
File me under W
because I wonce
was
a woman.

In “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu imagines a victim of marital injustice writing, “But this last privilege I still retain;/ Th’ oppressed and injured always may complain.” “Pirate Jenny’s Song” and “Secretary’s Chant” invoke this last privilege. I imagine them sharing these poems around a barbecue on the one day of the year that has been specially set up for them.

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Facing the Terrors of Freedom & Joy

By Robin Bates | Published: August 31, 2024
Gerard van Honhorst, St. Peter Being Freed from Prison

Sunday

I was thumbing through my Collected Poetry of Denise Levertov yesterday and came across a wonderful poem that I had forgotten about. My late friend Dana Greene, in her biography of Levertov, spoke of the poet’s focus on “primary wonder,” and what I love about Levertov is that, for her, such wonder is not the end but the beginning. It’s after we experience divine revelation that the real work begins.

That’s how it was for the disciples after they encountered the risen Jesus and how it is for Peter in the poem that I share today. “St. Peter and the Angel” is a reflection on this episode, recounted in Acts 12: 5-11, about Peter’s miraculous escape from Herod’s prison. Here’s the passage:

 Peter was therefore kept in prison, but constant prayer was offered to God for him by the church. And when Herod was about to bring him out, that night Peter was sleeping, bound with two chains between two soldiers; and the guards before the door were keeping the prison. Now behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shone in the prison; and he struck Peter on the side and raised him up, saying, “Arise quickly!” And his chains fell off his hands. Then the angel said to him, “Gird yourself and tie on your sandals”; and so he did. And he said to him, “Put on your garment and follow me.” So he went out and followed him, and did not know that what was done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they were past the first and the second guard posts, they came to the iron gate that leads to the city, which opened to them of its own accord; and they went out and went down one street, and immediately the angel departed from him.

And when Peter had come to himself, he said, “Now I know for certain that the Lord has sent His angel, and has delivered me from the hand of Herod and from all the expectation of the Jewish people.”

Somewhat like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Peter realizes that our most challenging task is handling the freedom we are granted. While the Inquisitor speaks of the fear, however, he omits the joy that comes with embracing that freedom. When we can no longer feel the angel, that’s when we hear our own footsteps and experience the “long street’s majestic emptiness”:

St. Peter and the Angel
By Denise Levertov

Delivered out of raw continual pain,
smell of darkness, groans of those others
to whom he was chained–

unchained, and led
past the sleepers,
door after door silently opening–
out!
    And along a long street’s
majestic emptiness under the moon:

one hand on the angel’s shoulder, one
feeling the air before him,
eyes open but fixed . . .

And not till he saw the angel had left him,
alone and free to resume
the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
what he had still to do,
not till then did he recognize
this was no dream. More frightening
than arrest, than being chained to his warders:
he could hear his own footsteps suddenly.
Had the angel’s feet
made any sound? He could not recall.
No one had missed him, no one was in pursuit.
He himself must be
the key, now, to the next door,
the next terrors of freedom and joy.

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