ICE Violates Charlotte’s Web

By Robin Bates | Published: November 18, 2025
Garth Williams, illus. from Charlotte’s Web

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Wednesday

In a classic example of how bad people can twist a good book to their own ends, ICE is calling its Charlotte deportation efforts “Operation Charlotte’s Web.” Leader Gregory Bovino has even had the effrontery to quote from the novel: “Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west, North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please.” To which he adds, “This time, the breeze hit Charlotte like a storm.”

On Monday the Charlotte Observer reported that the storm involved masked ICE agents in green uniforms detaining 130 people in public places, supermarkets, busy roadways and an east Charlotte church.

The estate of E.B. White has hit back, with White’s granddaughter and literary executor saying that the operation is “antithetical” to the author’s values. Martha White has stated that her grandfather “certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons. He didn’t condone fearmongering.”

In an interview with the Observer, White pointed out that the novel “is all about compassion. It’s all about taking responsibility for those who are vulnerable and putting yourself in another person’s shoes.” She added that White, in his White Flag collection of essays (1943-46), wrote that the United States is regarded by people everywhere “as a dream come true, a sort of world-state in miniature. Here dwell the world’s emigrants under one law, and the law is: Thou shalt not push thy neighbor around.” 

Further on he stated, 

By some curious divinity which in him lies, Man, in this experiment of mixed races and mixed creeds, has turned out more good than bad, more right than wrong, more kind than cruel, and more sinned against than sinning. This is the world’s hope and its chance.

It is in this spirit that Charlotte, in her final conversation with Wilbur, explains why she has expended her remaining energy to save his life. When he asks, “Why did you do all this for me? I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you,” the spider replies, 

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

Yes, antithetical to everything that ICE and Trump and Trump’s minions stand for.

One Garth Williams illustration from Charlotte’s Web that was seared into my brain at six or so is Fern preventing her father from taking an axe to runt-of-the-litter Wilbur. Think of her as a Charlotte protester standing up against ICE. Of course, Mr. Arable is more justified than ICE in his rationale:  farmers must kill animals to earn a living. This is the unwelcome news that the Old Sheep has for Wilbur: “Well, I don’t like to spread bad news but they’re fattening you up because they’re going to kill you…”

The only rationale that ICE has for going after most of those it is targeting is that they are people of color.

Bovino identifies ICE with the baby spiders who are about to be scattered to the wind. In actuality, there is nothing random about ICE, which is targeting blue cities. The passage he quotes more accurately describes our immigrants, who come down wherever circumstances allow. As the baby spiders put it, “We are aeronauts and we are going out into the world to make webs for ourselves.” 

If Bovino wants to find a kindred soul in the novel, he should settle on Templeton the rat, who hoards rotten eggs and is described as having

no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything. He would kill a gosling if he could get away with it – the goose knew that. Everybody knew it.

It is Templeton who, displaying a sadism characteristic of ICE, bursts Wilbur’s bubble at the fair, telling him, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Zuckerman changes his mind about you. Wait till he gets hankering for some fresh pork and smoked ham and crisp bacon! He’ll take the knife to you, my boy.” 

Fortunately, Templeton doesn’t get the last word, and there’s a chance that Trumpism won’t either. The final message of Charlotte’s Web is one of renewal, which we all need at this moment. After Charlotte dies, breaking Wilbur’s heart, we are reminded that spring always follows winter:

The snows melted and ran away. The streams and ditches bubbled and chattered with rushing water. A sparrow with a streaky breast arrived and sang. The light strengthened, the mornings came sooner. Almost every morning there was another new lamb in the sheepfold. The goose was sitting on nine eggs. The sky seemed wider and a warm wind blew. The last remaining strands of Charlotte’s old web floated away and vanished. 

A major reason why America has flourished is because immigrants, like baby spiders, have floated in, replenishing, rejuvenating and reinvigorating the nation. As E.B. White’s granddaughter notes, books like Charlotte’s Web have been vital in opening our hearts and minds to the vulnerable. In the novel, Charlotte stands in for the author—Wilbur regards her as “a true friend and a good writer”—one who devotes her life to helping a fellow creature. The final result is a world in which we can live in harmony with a diverse population, “a sort of world state in miniature.” This vision even includes a place for rats:

Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

Hold on to this vision and don’t stop fighting.

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Pullman Anticipates ICE Brutality

By Robin Bates | Published: November 17, 2025
ICE agents raiding a house

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Tuesday

For five years I’ve been anxiously awaiting the publication of the final volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy and would have stood in a midnight bookstore line like a Harry Potter fan to get it. I can now report that The Rose Field is as delicious as anticipated.

Before reading it, however, I reread the second book in the trilogy. In the process, I discovered that The Secret Commonwealth packs more of a punch now than it did five years ago. That’s because it captures what many Americans are experiencing daily under the Trump administration

The novel features scenes where agents from the Consistorial Court of Discipline (CCD) barge into previously off-limits Oxford University, carting away faculty and staff without any due process. The CCD is the enforcement arm of the Magisterium, which Pullman sets up as a cross between the Catholic Church of the Spanish Inquisition and the repressive Geneva church of John Calvin. The episode that got to me was two agents invading the home of an elderly professor and twisting her arm behind her back to get her to talk. Two other women, upon arriving, behave not unlike those brave protesters in L.A., Chicago, Charlotte and elsewhere when they see ICE grabbing people. Brenda is the more fearless of the two:

“Let her go at once,” Brenda demanded. “Take your hands off, stand back, move right away. Go on.”
Topham’s reply was to twist even harder. Hannah couldn’t help a little gasp of pain.

At one point in the interchanges, the two women are shoved to the floor but come up wielding fire irons. Brenda says defiantly, “Now turn around, go outside, and leave. You’re not getting any further with this. I don’t know who you think you are or what you think you’re doing, but by God you’re not going to get away with it.”

Janet, once a timid secretary, also refuses to back down, earning a threat from the second CCD agent. “I remember you,” he says. “You can say goodbye to that job.”

Brenda and Janet are also upset about the arrest of housekeeper Alice Lonsdale, who (again like a number of American protesters) has been arrested for lipping off to the CCD. Neither woman backs down:

Janet was trembling with shock, but Brenda seemed to have no fear, confronting the two CCD men as if all the moral power in the situation belonged to her, which it did.

“You seem to be unaware that we have authority to carry out investigations”–Manton began, but Brenda’s voice overwhelmed his.

“No, you haven’t, you thief, you coward, you thug. No one has the authority to come into anyone’s house without a warrant—you know that, and I know that. Everyone knows it. Nor do you have the authority to arrest people without a cause. Why did you arrest Alice Lonsdale?”

“Nothing to do with—”

“It’s got everything to do with me. I’ve known that woman since she was a child. There’s not a criminal bone in her body, and she’s been a first-rate servant to Jordan College too. What did you do to the Master to make him give her up?”

“That’s got nothing—”

“You can’t give me a reason because there isn’t one, you wretch, you bully, you sneaking villain.”

The two agents ultimately decide to cut their losses and beat a tactical retreat, although not before Brenda berates them one final time. “We’ll find her,” she says, speaking of Alice. “We’ll have her out of your custody, you lawless vermin. The day’ll come when the bloody CCD is drummed right out of this country with your tails between your legs.”

To save face, one of the agents utters one final set of threats on his way out:

“We know you,” he said, looking at Janet, “and we’ll have you before long,” he went on, looking at Hannah, “and we’ll find out who you are easy enough, and you’ll be in real trouble,” he finished, looking at Brenda.

Just the coldness in his eyes was enough to frighten Janet, but she felt defiant too, having helped in a small way. It might be worth losing her job to feel like that for a minute or two.

When Janet goes into work the following day, she discovers that she has in fact been fired. The administrator who has capitulated to CCD, however, can’t look her in the face as he delivers the news. I thought of those universities and school systems that have capitulated to Trump’s extortion threats, as well as those who fired faculty and staff for posting disparaging comments about rightwing provocateur Charlie Kirk following his assassination:

“Janet, I’m sorry but I have some unfortunate news,” he said.

He was speaking quickly. He still didn’t look at her. She felt her stomach about to sink, and held her tongue.

“I—um—it’s been made clear to me that it would be difficult to—ah—continue your employment,” he said.

“Why?”

“It seems that you unfortunately made a, umm, well, a bad impression on the two officers who came here yesterday. I must say I saw nothing of that sort myself—always valued your complete professionalism—and it may be that their attitude was a little excessive—nevertheless, these are not easy times, and…”

Janet explains what the agents were doing in words that apply only too well to ICE’s behavior:

“They were stealing the property of an old lady and treating her brutally, and I happened to see it going on, and me and my friend stepped in and helped her. And that’s all, Mr. Stringer, that’s all that happened. Is this the kind of country we’re living in now, that people can be sacked from jobs they do well just because they inconvenience bullies and thugs from the CCD? Is that the kind of place this is?”

The Bursar put his head in his hands. Janet had never in her life spoken to an employer like that, and she stood with fast-beating heart while he sighed heavily and three times tried to say something.

“It’s very difficult,” he said. He looked up, but not at her. “There are things I can’t explain. Pressures and tensions that…umm…college staff, domestic staff are quite properly protected from. These are times unlike any…I have to protect the staff from…”

And at the end:

He was pretending he couldn’t hear her. His face was turned down; he sat perfectly still; he was pretending she wasn’t there, and that no one was asking him questions, and he seemed to think that if he sat still and didn’t look at her, what he pretended would come true.

There are craven Bursars all over the United States right now. Thankfully, there are also Brendas and Janets. Thanks to their courage and resolve, there’s a better chance that a day of reckoning will come for ICE bullies and their enablers.

Of course, we shouldn’t need brave souls having to step up. As Galileo says in Bertolt Brecht’s play about him, “Unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes.”

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Trump and the Non-Barking Dog

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2025

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Monday

Lacking the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein—files in which Trump’s name reportedly appears hundreds of times—the public is left with files released by the Epstein estate. Of the thousands of pages available, one containing a Sherlock Holmes reference is drawing particular attention. In 2011 Epstein emailed confederate Ghislaine Maxwell, “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [named redacted] spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief etc. im 75% there. ” To which Maxwell replied, “I have been thinking about that…”

The key tidbit here, of course, is that (according to Epstein) Trump spent hours with an underaged and trafficked girl. But what’s the significance of the Sherlock Holmes reference?

Let’s first look at the story. The non-barking dog appears in “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” (not The Hound of the Baskervilles), which is about horse trainer Straker attempting to hobble his own horse, who is a prohibitive favorite in an upcoming race. In desperate need of cash, Straker figures that if he subtly nicks one of Blaze’s tendons so that no one can see and then bets against him, he will replenish his coffers. He therefore drugs the stable boy, leads the horse outside, and attempts the deed. The horse, however, panics and kills him by kicking him in the head (although we don’t discover this until the end of the tale).

Holmes is puzzled that no one hears the dog barking when the horse is taken:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

He goes on to explain:

Before deciding that question I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others. The Simpson incident had shown me that a dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though some one had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.

Demonstrating a Trump-like ability to distract us from the original crime, Arthur Conan Doyle presents us with a further plot complication: the horse disappears. It turns out that the manager of an adjoining estate, who is also betting against Silver Blaze, discovers him wandering on the heath, leads him to his own stables, and disguises him by painting over his silver blaze. At this point an innocent bookmaker (Simpson), who is in the area checking on the horses, is accused of having killed Straker. Holmes finds the horse and gets him to the racetrack on time, where he comes in first.

We could wish for such a happy ending in our own Epstein affair but let’s figure what the pedophile meant in his email:

First of all, the dog that didn’t bark has become a common enough expression that Epstein wasn’t necessarily referring directly to the story. Even if he wasn’t, however, let’s apply it to the situation. Trump would be Straker, the crooked horse trainer alone with his intended victim. That no one has barked out his name—not his victim, not the police—is what confuses Epstein and Maxwell. It’s as though they are in the early part of the mystery, possessing a significant clue but aren’t yet clear what it means. Or rather, the mystery for them is not a whodunit since they already know that Straker is guilty. They just can’t figure out why the police are failing to finger the culprit.

Of course, they are far from the only people that Trump has baffled with his ability to avoid accountability. Ultimately, it’s going to take more than Sherlock Holmes to solve that conundrum. Holmes can make connections that everyone else misses, but what does a literary detective do with someone who crimes in the open and even boasts about it? Where’s the intricate plot solving that is key to the genre?

Given how Trump, in the most blatant ways possible, is signaling he wants the Epstein files to be buried, we need to shift to a different literary detective. The one I have in mind is one whom Holmes expresses contempt for. When Watson in their early days together compares Holmes to Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, Holmes rises, lights his pipe, and replies,

No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin. Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.

In “The Purloined Letter,” however, Dupin is able to solve a mystery whose solution is hiding in plain sight. After the police fail to locate a blackmail letter despite conducting an extraordinarily meticulous search of minister G___’s apartment, Dupin saunters in and finds it in the letter rack where it lies only slightly disguised. “Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” Dupin observes to the police commissioner.

To invoke one final detective in this discussion, Erik Lönnrot in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass” is also befuddled by a mystery whose solution is staring him straight in the face. His criminal opponent, knowing how Lönnrot’s mind works, uses the detective’s preference for complex solutions to trap and kill him.

Before he dies, Lönnrot says, “I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too.” He is referring to Zeno’s paradox, but the straight line applies only too well to Donald Trump.

For decades there has been a straight line between Trump and Epstein, just as there has been a straight line between Trump and the January 6 coup attempt, a straight line between Trump and extortion, a straight line between Trump and money laundering, a straight line between Trump and bribery, a straight line between Trump and sexual assault, a straight line between Trump and countless other crimes. That single straight line has befuddled newspaper reporters and political opponents alike.

Understanding how Trump has evaded prison each and every time requires a different kind of mind than that possessed by Doyle’s famous detective.

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Barbarous in Beauty, What Wind-Walks!

By Robin Bates | Published: November 15, 2025
Jean-François Millet, detail from The Gust of Wind

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Sunday

aIn his ecstatic poem “Hurrahing the Harvest,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s heart is lifted up by both the harvest season and by the prospect of meeting God face to face. Fall here is not a season for mourning, as it is in Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” but a time of ecstatic joy. As the old hymn has it, “we shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.”

The hymn, however, doesn’t entirely capture the fullness of Hopkins’s heart, which is lifted up as he sees the wild wind whipping around the grain dust and shredding the clouds. The immense joy he feels is God: in this harvest time he is “glean[ing] our Savior,” whose “rapturous love” greets us with realer and rounder replies than can the eyes, heart, looks, and lips of our fellow human beings. The hills he views in the distance, hung as though from the azurous blue sky, he imagines to be Christ’s “world-wielding shoulder.” They are like a mighty stallion although this stallion is sweet as well as strong.

This vision has been there all along, the speaker acknowledges in the last four lines, only he has been wanting in appreciation. Once we are awakened to the God’s grandeur (to borrow from another Hopkins poem)—once beholder and Savior meet—watch out! At that point the heart grows wings and hurls itself upwards, even as the earth hurls off below it:

Hurrahing the Harvest
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
        Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior
        Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
        Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Savior;
        And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
        Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
        Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
        And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

The concluding bird image brings to mind maybe my favorite Hopkins poem, “The Windhover,” which opens with a similar soaring of the heart:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
    dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

When he became a Jesuit priest, Hopkins apparently stopped writing poetry out of fear that his poems were too sensual. Fortunately, his religious superiors encouraged him to return, and the result is a visceral experience of religious transcendence that reminds one of St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart. The key to reading Hopkins is to give oneself over to the dazzling images and the explosive rhythms. Perhaps it was his attempt to contain these feelings over the period of silence that led to them to come bursting out as they do.

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My College Search for Authenticity

By Robin Bates | Published: November 13, 2025

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Friday

This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.

I want to pause for a moment at this point in my life history to reflect on feelings of inauthenticity that have plagued me for much of my life—up until I was 50 or so. I don’t know if this topic will be of general interest, but I’d like to figure it out for myself. As I’m telling my life through my experiences with literature, I can report that many of the literature essays I’ve written in college and graduate school—as well as some scholarly articles I’ve published–have felt inauthentic. That I received A’s on many of them just makes them appear even more inauthentic, as though I was good as jumping through meaningless hoops.

Authenticity is a big deal with the existentialists, who introduced me to the concept. The authentic individual, they contend, lives in accordance with his or her true self rather than conforming to societal expectations. Sartre’s No Exit, which I read in high school, features a political activist, now dead, who spends the afterlife being haunted by the fact that he hasn’t lived up to the ideal of a political martyr. Whereas he likes to think of himself as a heroic pacifist who was executed for his beliefs, in fact he was a jerk and a coward, one who abused his wife and who was executed for desertion.

Throughout my years in college, I felt like a political coward. I obsessed over my fear that I wasn’t doing enough to stop the war, which I saw as demanding something dangerous and committed. The marches I attended, and even my arrest, didn’t seem to require enough of me, as though I were just cosplaying a resistor. To be real, however, would involve stepping out of my comfort zone (or so I thought), and like Sartre’s anti-hero I worried that I wouldn’t be up to the challenge.

In fact, this proved to be the case. I once tried campaigning for George McGovern in 1972 but was so nervous about knocking on the doors of strangers that I became sick and gave up. Seeking a model for true commitment, I once attended a conference of the Trotskyist Worker’s League, but the members’ fanaticism repelled me. (Looking back, I suspect some of them were cosplaying revolutionaries.) In short, I felt perpetually guilty for not doing enough, even though I wasn’t sure what doing more would look like.

As I look back, I think the source of my anxiety was the conflict between desiring to stay safely ensconced in a world of ideas and books and feeling that I should be out in the world making meaningful change. (Perhaps this a variant of desiring to remain a child while knowing that I had to grow up.) To my eyes, my father appeared the ideal model, and I desperately desired to be just like him. Here he was, establishing himself as a world-class authority on the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire while, at the same time, devoting himself to noble causes (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement). He could even point to some tangible results, such as the desegregation of Franklin County schools and the University of the South.

And yet not only could I not entirely follow in his footsteps—after all, one must find one’s own way—but I worried that there was something unreal about him. When he was caught up in his theories, he sometimes seemed untethered from earthly concerns. It was my mother who kept the family grounded: she took care of the finances, handled our illnesses, made community organizations work, and ultimately founded and ran for 17 years our town newspaper (which she typed up every Wednesday on mimeographed pages). While I found my father more stimulating and exciting, somehow it was my mother who appeared to engage more effectively with the real world. 

My most meaningful college essays were ones dealing with this tension between wanting to remain in the world of books and feeling the need to break out. The Beowulf essay offered a way to bridge the conflict as it showed how a society could use a work of literature to negotiate the deep threats it faced. A satire I wrote for a “Utopian Literature” class showed how a dystopian society I called Notelarc (an anagram for Carleton) kept the population docile by burying them in books and essays. (In other words, I was worried about remaining in this safe realm and blamed college for enabling my desire.) My senior thesis argued that the works of Rousseau and Diderot had more of an impact on the French Revolution than did the “penny pamphlets” that activists wrote and hawked on the streets. In short, in these essays I was trying to find a place in the world for someone with my interests and passions.

By contrast, other essays I wrote felt inauthentic. To provide one example, I remember a paper I wrote in the early British Literature survey where I grappled with the question, “Why is Faustus unable to repent and turn back to God?”  I systematically went through the text, came up with answers, weighed them against each other, settled on one, and received an A. The question, however, didn’t speak to anything deep within me. (It does now as I more fully appreciate self-destructive inner struggles.) The same was true for an essay on W.B. Yeats’s Cuchulain plays as I can’t even remember what I wrote. Nor can I remember which novel I chose to analyze in my “Contemporary French Novels” class.

Something similar would happen in graduate school. It seemed like choosing a meaningful topic was a matter of chance, which sometimes I stumbled upon and sometimes didn’t. I was out to please the professor or the academy but not to reflect upon my own soul. I mention this because, as I evolved as a teacher, I decided I wouldn’t let the same thing happen to my students. I determined they would always have something “at stake” in their literature essays, and I devised various means (all of them requiring considerable time and work on my part) for steering them to topics what would mean something to them. Likewise, in this blog I focus on works that help me see more deeply into matters that I consider urgent.

I mention in passing that my commitment to meaningful engagement shaped how I worked with my advisees as well. I listened to them closely, tried to hear what moved and motivated them, and then brainstormed with them about possible careers and people who could advise them further. Our goal, I would tell them, was to find out what excited them and then figure out how they could get paid for doing it. Or as Joseph Campbell puts it, how to follow their bliss.

I don’t know how clear I have been in this introspective romp. Perhaps what I’m saying is that, as long as I was trying to be my father, and as long as I was trying to please the academy so that I could become a professor like him, I wasn’t living in accordance with my true self. Only when I encountered a crisis in my teaching—when inauthentic student essays started draining the life out of me—did I face the issue head-on. As a result, I became a very different kind of teacher than he was.

For too long I believed Athena’s problematic observation to Telemachus in The Odyssey: “It is rare for sons to be like fathers: Only a few are better, most are worse.” Many of us must symbolically kill our fathers if we are to find ourselves. How I finally did so will be the subject of a future post.

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The Surrender Caucus, the Last Battle

By Robin Bates | Published: November 12, 2025

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Thursday

I still haven’t gotten over the gut punch many of us felt when the “Surrender Caucus”—seven Democrats and an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats—voted to end the Democratic filibuster, which was the only tool the party had to prevent health insurance premiums for 24 million Americans from doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling. Republicans refused to negotiate, using SNAP benefits and hungry Americans as hostage, and their hard line appears to have worked. We’re now back to business as usual, only with the GOP once again learning that the party that cares about governing will always fold when the going gets rough. 

After spending months watching the Trump administration fearlessly violate norms, laws, the Constitution, and basic human decency, the resistance was finally feeling hopeful.  First there were the October 18 No Kings marches, which drew close to seven million protesters. Then we saw a blue wave on election night as Democratic candidates swamped the opposition, a positive sign for next year’s midterm elections. With the filibuster, we believed that Senate Democrats were finally showing backbone after capitulating on the budget last May. All the momentum, however, came to a screeching halt with this Neville Chamberlain moment.

My sick feelings have taken me back to my least favorite episode in the Narnia chronicles, which I otherwise adore. The last battle in The Last Battle involves the forces of King Tirian, which include Jill, Eustace, Jewel the unicorn, Farsight the eagle, Poggin the dwarf, and others. The Narnians have squared off against Calormenes intent on seizing Narnia, and the battle is notable in part because Jill takes part, the first C.S. Lewis heroine we see shooting enemy soldiers. The Narnians notch a temporary victory but then realize that more Calormenes are on their way against their now depleted ranks. They have another card to play, however, as wild Narnian horses rush to the rescue. Think of them as Senate Democrats demonstrating unaccustomed fortitude. Thanks to Narnian mice, the horses have escaped Calormene captivity:

“Listen!” said Jewel: and then “Look!” said Farsight. A moment later there was no doubt what it was. With a thunder of hoofs, with tossing heads, widened nostrils, and waving manes, over a score of Talking Horses of Narnia came charging up the hill. The gnawer and nibblers had done their work.

Then comes the stab in the back. A group of dwarfs, who owe their freedom to the Narnians, now turn their arrows on them:

Poggin the Dwarf and the children opened their mouths to cheer but that cheer never came. Suddenly the air was full of the sound of twanging bowstrings and hissing arrows. It was the Dwarfs who were shooting and—for a moment Jill could hardly believe her eyes—they were shooting the Horses. Dwarfs are deadly archers. Horse after horse rolled over. Not one of those noble Beasts ever reached the King.

At least the Surrender Caucus is not jeering at its allies as the dwarfs do. “Thought we were on your side, did you?” the dwarfs shout. “No fear. We don’t want any Talking Horses. We don’t want you to win any more than the other gang. You can’t take us in. The dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

A little while later, the dwarfs begin directing their arrows against the Calormenes, as we can expect the Surrender Caucus to begin doing again against the GOP.  The damage has been done, however, and, in the end, the dwarfs don’t fare any better than the Narnians. All are thrown into a stable, which functions as Lewis’s metaphor for death. “I feel in my bones,” says Poggin, “that we shall all, one by one, pass through that dark door before morning.” Better for the author to show Jill being dragged by the hair and thrust through the entrance than having her disemboweled by a sword.

In the novel the Calormenes presumably overrun Narnia, although we don’t see this since Lewis at this point introduces the Book of Revelation. Earthly setbacks ultimately don’t matter, we learn, since a final apocalypse renders irrelevant such trivial concerns. When the good guys all go to Narnia heaven and the bad guys to the other place, we cease to worry about old Narnia.

Labor activist Joe Hill mocked such consolation with “You’ll get pie in the sky by and by.” Those who oppose the authoritarian takeover of America don’t have that luxury. Their battles must be fought in what Aslan calls the Shadow-Lands, and we’ll be facing a desolate wasteland if the Calormenes win.

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Surprised by the Joy of Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: November 11, 2025

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Wednesday

For a light respite from the news, I report today on an article on the humor website McSweeney’s entitled, “I Started Reading Performatively, and It Turns Out Books Are Pretty Good.” Just as some people “dress to impress,” apparently others “read to impress.” Or pretend to read.

If you see someone’s nose buried in, say, Moby Dick on a commuter train or bus, these days one may suspect that the individual is performative-reading since who would read Melville’s long and challenging work? Actually, my son Darien really did read Moby Dick while commuting to his Washington, D.C. job, along with E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and other works. But, okay, he’s the son of a literature professor. The fictional author of the article, by contrast, posts a photo of Picture of Dorian Gray on her Instagram account to signal that she’s an interesting person—only to find a Reply Guy quizzing her about it.

Note: I had to look up what a Reply Guy is and learned that it is “an internet slang term for someone who excessively responds to social media posts, often in an annoying, condescending, or overly familiar or flirtatious manner.” No doubt my younger readers already know that.

Anyway, I can’t think of a better work than Dorian Gray for the McSweeney’s article since Instagram, Facebook, and other media sites invite us to present idealized versions of ourselves while hiding our corrupt inner souls (or whatever). As T.S. Eliot would say, we “prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet.” So when a Reply Guy queries the writer about the book, she foresees her “carefully curated online persona” unraveling. As she puts it, “They might wonder if my bed really is made every morning, if that’s my real dog, or if I am even a good person.”

Here’s how the discovery that she fears is presented in the novel. Dorian has taken artist Basil Hallward to see it years after he painted, during which time Dorian has descended into a life of depravity. As I’m sure you know, the portrait registers all of Dorian’s sins, even as he himself remains unblemished:

Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it.  “My God! if it is true,” he exclaimed, “and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!”  He held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it.  It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away.  The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.

Who knows what hearts of darkness lie behind those engaging Facebook photos?

To her credit, our essayist does not cancel Reply Guy as Dorian cancels (stabs) Basil but instead figures that she should read the book:

Out of options, I read Oscar Wilde’s seminal work in one night, like an executioner was watching me. The book was actually relatable, even good. It made me… think. Perhaps the relentless pursuit of youth ultimately depletes our humanity? Or something. I told my Reply Guy this, and he said, “Nice.”

I love the ellipsis before “think,” as well as Reply Guy’s superficial response. He’s unaware that he has surprised her into depth. Having seen something interesting happen when she included a book in her Instagram post, the essayist decides to take the next step, which is performance-read on a bus. I love how she depicts Cervantes’s masterpiece:

I wasn’t sold on reading, but I did like feeling smart, and Don Quixote is like the Louis Vuitton bag of people with depth. I started bringing books with me onto the train, inside the bodega, to the park, just pretty much anywhere people could see me and wonder, “How can someone so conventionally attractive also have intellectual pursuits?”

What follows is another surprise:

But I could only fake flip the pages on the bus for so long without getting bored. It was easier to actually read what was on the page, and well, the rest is history. And science. And philosophy and romance and satire and fiction. I started to learn stuff, like did you guys know that Frankenstein wasn’t the monster? That women couldn’t get a credit card until 1974? Or that the Underground Railroad wasn’t underground like a wine cellar but underground like good music? Or that the CIA overthrew Latin American governments, and that’s where the term “banana republic” comes from?

Once you get hooked on reading, suddenly cute guys become not the goal but an irritant:

Soon, when a couple of the cute guys started chatting me up about the book, I got pissed and told them I was busy. Couldn’t they see I was at the climax? I’ve started going to the library, where I can be left alone. I’ve even got my own card now. And you don’t have to buy a nine-dollar latte to be there; they just let you sit down. How cool is that? 

Pretty cool indeed.

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Military Service and the American Dream

By Robin Bates | Published: November 10, 2025
Ira Hayes, member of Gila River Indian Community and Iwo Jima hero

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Tuesday – Veterans Day

This year my church is sponsoring, as its Sunday Forum, a lecture series based on the Hebrew prophet Micah’s injunction to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before your god.” Fortuitously, on the Sunday closest to Veterans Day we heard a veteran talk about what the passage means to him. Gene Hart is this year’s seminarian—basically a rector in training—and his talk on “Justice, Mercy, and Humility in the Land of Violence” traced his own evolution into a man who has cares deeply about the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Or put another way, he embraces Jesus’s vision of love for all humanity. 

Gene informed us that he hasn’t always thought this way. When he was growing up in rural Georgia, he acknowledged that he had the ingrained racism, misogyny, and homophobia that came with the territory. The military changed that, however, as he served alongside comrades who were female, LGBTQ+, and belonging to various races, ethnicities, and religions. A retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel with over 32 years of distinguished service, Gene served in Bosnia, Israel, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. His bodyguard in Kabul, he reported, was a woman whom he trusted with his life. Now that he has left this profession for the church, Gene is determined to live out his new understanding.

As Gene was talking, I thought about how the armed forces have taken to heart the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence, so much so that reactionaries like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are conducting an all-out assault on women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folk who have advanced in the military. While I know that one finds rightwing bigots in the military, most of the veterans I personally know are like Gene, including one officer—recipient of a bronze star for service in Vietnam—who turned in his medals after he returned from the war and who is appalled at what the United States has become under Trump. And another, who passed two weeks ago, who was passionate about civil rights. A number of protesters who have stood up against ICE, sometimes getting arrested, are veterans. My own father, who served as a military policeman in Munich in the last year of World War II, had his eyes opened by the African American soldier who was paired with him, so that when he returned to the States he worked ardently for racial integration. All these veterans were or are appalled by America’s history of macho white supremacy.

The dream that military enlistment offers a path towards achieving the American DEI dream shows up in Ceremony, by Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko. The novel is about a veteran, Tayo, who survives the Bataan Death March but returns to his reservation with a severe case of PTSD. The healing ceremony he undergoes addresses not only this illness but also the psychological impact of racism on native Americans. 

Tayo follows his cousin Rocky into the army after a recuriter assures them that the military is the pathway to equality. “Anyone can fight for America,” he says, before adding—as though he is being wonderfully tolerant–“even you boys. In a time of need, anyone can fight for her.”

A little later in his spiel he tells them,

“Now I know you boys love America as much as we do, but this is your big chance to show it!” He stood up then, as he had rehearsed, and looked them in the eye sincerely. He handed them color pamphlets with a man in a khaki uniform and gold braid on the cover; in the background, behind the figure in the uniform, there was a gold eagle with its wings spread across an American flag.

Initially the dream seems to be working:

The first day in Oakland he and Rocky walked down the street together and a big Chrysler stopped in the street and an old white woman rolled down the window and said, “God bless you, God bless you,” but it was the uniform, not them, she blessed.

After the war, Tayo—drinking with his fellow veterans—articulates their longing to be accepted by white society. I think the passage explains why many minority voters were willing to vote alongside white supremacists for Trump in the last election, but put that aside for the moment. Tayo says that Indians saw the military as their golden ticket out of their inferior status:

One time there were these Indians, see. They put on uniforms, cut their hair. They went off to a big war. They had a real good time too. Bars served them booze, old white ladies on the street smiled at them. At Indians, remember that, because that’s all they were. Indians. These Indians fucked white women, they had as much as they wanted too. They were MacArthur’s boys, white whores took their money same as anyone. These Indians got treated the same as anyone: Wake Island, Iwo Jima. They got the same medals for bravery, the same flag over the coffin.

Then come the rumblings that it may all be an illusion. I wonder if those in the military whom Hegseth has unjustly demoted and fired sensed ahead of time what was coming:

See these dumb Indians thought these good times would last. They didn’t ever want to give up the cold beer and the blond cunt. Hell no! They were America the Beautiful too, this was the land of the free just like teachers said in school. They had the uniform and they didn’t look different no more. They got respect.

When they return from the war, however, the discover nothing has changed:

First time you walked down the street in Gallup or Albuquerque, you knew. Don’t lie. You knew right away. The war was over, the uniform was gone. All of a sudden that man at the store waits on you last, makes you wait until all the white people bought what they wanted. And the white lady at the bus depot, she’s real careful now not to touch your hand when she counts out your change. You watch it slide across the counter at you, and you know! Goddamn it! You stupid sonofabitches! You know!

The civil rights movement in the south was set in motion, in part, by Black war veterans returning from World War II expecting to be treated differently by the country they had served. In “Will V-Day Be Me-Day too?” Langston Hughes addresses white America. The Jim Crow cattle car may be a reference to the Holocaust:

You can’t say I didn’t fight
To smash the Fascists’ might.
You can’t say I wasn’t with you
in each battle.
As a soldier, and a friend.
When this war comes to an end,
Will you herd me in a Jim Crow car
Like cattle?

Or will you stand up like a man
At home and take your stand
For Democracy?
That’s all I ask of you.
When we lay the guns away
To celebrate
Our Victory Day
WILL V-DAY BE ME-DAY, TOO?
That’s what I want to know.

            Sincerely,
                GI Joe.

Tayo’s war buddies, however, don’t want to hear what he’s dishing out, preferring to blame the truthteller. Tayo realizes that they

spent all their checks trying to get back the good times, and a skinny light-skinned bastard had ruined it….Here they were, trying to bring back that old feeling, that feeling they belonged to America the way they felt during the war. They blamed themselves for losing the new feeling; they never talked about it, but they blamed themselves just like they blamed themselves for losing the land the white people took. They never thought to blame white people for any of it; they wanted white people for their friends. They never saw that it was the white people who gave them that feeling and it was white people who took it away again when the war was over.

Ceremony is powerful in how it shows a healing way forward, not only for Native Americans but for all Americans. At the end of the novel, Tayo opts for non-violence as he builds a new life for himself and for his people. 

It seems ironic that an organization like the military would be a driver of the American Dream, but so it has proved in numerous cases, including Gene’s. And now, as we see veterans all over the country running for elected office to save American democracy—this includes Virginia’s recently elected first woman governor—we have reason to hope that what they saw modeled in the armed forces can put us back in touch with our founding ideals.

It’s another reason to thank them for their service.

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Chicago’s Big Shoulders vs. ICE

By Robin Bates | Published: November 9, 2025
Chicago protests against Operation Midway Blitz

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Monday

Poetry is for when life gets tough, I used to tell my students, and when life got tough for Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis turned to Carl Sandburg’s famous homage to the city. Ellis recently cited “Chicago” as she issued an injunction against “Operation Midway Blitz” from using riot control weapons like pepper balls and tear gas without adequate justification and warning. 

According to Capitol Hill Illinois, Ellis

said she’d seen “ample evidence that agents … intended to cause protesters harm” during a number of clashes between the feds and members of the public that ended with the deployment of tear gas and left bystanders fearful and, in some cases, injured.

“I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using,” the judge said Thursday. “Pointing guns, pulling out pepper spray, throwing tear gas, shooting pepper balls and using other less-lethal munitions do not appear to be appropriate.”

According to the journal, Ellis catalogued more than a dozen incidents in which immigration agents used excessive force against members of the public.

I haven’t been able to find a transcript of Ellis’s comments and so don’t entirely know how she used “Chicago.” Capitol Hill Illinois claims that she read the entire poem, which makes sense since the poem is set up as a response to the kinds of accusations the Trump administration has been making. Here it is:

Hog Butcher for the World,
   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
   Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
   Stormy, husky, brawling,
   City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
   Bareheaded,
   Shoveling,
   Wrecking,
   Planning,
   Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
                   Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight
Handler to the Nation.

Whoever the “they” was in 1914, there are plenty of Trumpists attacking Chicago now. Indeed, the bullshit level has been turned up to 11. Trump recently said,

“I don’t know why Chicago isn’t calling us, saying, please give us help when you have over just a short period of time, 50 murders and hundreds of people shot. And then you have a governor that stands up and says how crime is just fine. It’s, it’s really crazy, but we’re bringing back law and order to our country,” Trump said.

Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security, under Kristi Noem, claimed that it was targeting “the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets.”

Interestingly, the accusations that Sandburg concedes as having some truth for Chicago (“wicked,” “crooked,” “brutal”) apply far more to the Trump White House than to the city. While Chicago politics were once notoriously corrupt, now it is the president and the Congressional allies who are wickedly covering for pedophiles (including possibly the president himself). Now it is the president who is crookedly and openly fishing for bribes, extorting law firms, media companies, and universities, and pardoning criminals in exchange for favors. Now it is the Trump administration that is brutally contributing to the wanton hunger of women and children (and of men too).

For its part, Chicago has cleaned up its act. Yes, murder is still a problem, although not more so than in many American cities and a fair amount of that is due to Republicans’ refusal to pass common sense gun laws. But Condé Nast Traveler‘s prestigious Readers’ Choice Awards has Chicago first on their list of Best Big Cities in the U.S. for the eighth straight year, and Chicago was recently listed as one of the world’s best cities for culture by Time Out, the only U.S. city to make the list. The real problem, as Donald Trump sees it, is that Chicago is a blue city in a blue state with an outspoken Democratic governor.

For her part, Ellis didn’t make any of the concessions that Sandburg makes, observing that it “simply is untrue” (as the Trump administration charges) that “Chicagoland area is in a vice hold of violence, ransacked by rioters and attacked by agitators.” 

“From Aurora to Cicero, and Chicago to Evanston to Waukegan,” she said, “this is a vibrant place, brimming with vitality and hope, striving to move forward from its complicated history.” Having caught out U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino in some outright fabrications, she asserted that the Justice Department “lack[s] credibility.”

Given all that the city is currently suffering, imagine how powerful it would be for Chicagoans to hear a judge read from the bench,

So I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive… 

Past Posts on Judges Citing Literature
Judge Invokes Handmaid’s Tale in Ruling 
Citing Orwell, Judge Rules against Trump 
Incoming Judge cites Maya Angelou
Trans Student Gavin and a Poetic Judge
A Judge’s Love Affair with Marcel Proust
Shakespeare in the Courtroom 
Trump Wants to Kill All the Lawyers
The Bard’s Defense of the Law and Lawyers
Marc Antony for the Prosecution

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