Job’s Doubts vs. Job’s Faith

By Robin Bates | Published: November 8, 2025
William Blake, Job and his “friends”

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Sunday

Today’s Old Testament reading needs surrounding context to fully appreciate it. Job is in the midst of his travails—everything has been stripped from him—and is wondering where God is. Why bad things happen to good people is about as basic as existential questions get. His friend Bildad is singularly unhelpful in this inquiry, having just told him that he must have brought his suffering upon himself, which Job knows is not the case. “I call aloud, but there is no justice,” he cries out.

In the midst of his complaining, however, comes a declaration of faith that provides us with today’s reading (Job 19:23-27a):

Job said,

“O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book! 

O that with an iron pen and with lead
they were engraved on a rock forever! 

For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 

and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God, 

whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.”

Even as he says these words, Job’s skin has already been destroyed since Satan, with God’s permission, has afflicted him “with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” “I am repulsive to my wife, loathsome to the sons of my own mother,” he laments.” But in spite of his suffering, Job asserts that God will redeem him in the end. How can one have doubts about God and assert faith in God at the same time?

Anne Lamott has a wonderful answer in her collection of essays Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. Faith, she says, takes one much further than definitive answers:

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.

The light returns for Job when God, in His/Her magnificent final speech, points out that Job has been thinking too small. Whatever happens to us as individuals—and yes, I can testify personally that when tragedy strikes we think of nothing else—we are part of a drama that is bigger than anything we can imagine. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God rhetorically asks before launching into a description of the wonders of creation.

Kahlil Gibran’s poem “On Death” captures some of this same wonder. Gibran gets at the meaning of Job asserting that he shall behold God and Jesus promising life eternal. It’s not that transcending death involves coming back in our old identities. It’s that we enter into a new relationship with creation. “[Only] when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance,” Gibran tells us. 

Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.
    And he said:
    You would know the secret of death.
    But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
    The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
    If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
    For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

    In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
    And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
    Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
    Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honor.
    Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
    Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

    For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
    And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

    Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
    And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
    And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Our job is to love life as deeply as we can when we have it. Because life will at times bruise us, doubts will inevitably arise.

Embrace those doubts. And then embrace whatever comes next.

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Why I Majored in History, Not English

By Robin Bates | Published: November 6, 2025
Antonio Gransci

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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 that 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.

Because of southern racism, I determined that, for college, I would get as far away from the south as I could. It wasn’t only that I was attending a segregated high school—we had our first African American student my senior year—but that I regularly encountered racist remarks from fellow students and some teachers. For instance, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, our rightwing American History teacher observed, “He lived by the sword, and he died by the sword.” I, who the year before had attended a King speech in Charleston where he decried the urban riots (“Therefore I say to you, not “burn, baby, burn!” but “build, baby build!”) stewed in silence. This is one reason why I left for my parents’ alma mater, which was Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. 

I knew I wasn’t in Tennessee anymore when, for first-year orientation, we were assigned various books by African American activists. I read them and remember being baffled by Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, which was far too accepting of the violence that King was condemning. (I now know that the author was a rapist masquerading as a liberation figure.) Nevertheless, it signaled to me that college was a far cry from high school.

1969 was a tumultuous year. Along with the urban riots, the Vietnam War was in full swing, and while I had a four-year student deferment, to our eyes it appeared that the war would never end. Our school observed a special protest moratorium in October and closed down for a week in April because of the Kent State killings. During that week I joined 80 Carleton and St. Olaf students and faculty in a demonstration designed to disrupt the Minneapolis draft induction center. We went intending to get arrested and, in order to participate, had to promise that we would go nonviolently when it happened. After two hours of blocking the doors, we were carted off to the Hennepin County jail in police wagons. 

I remember all of us singing John Lennon’s “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” which caused the elevator operator to roll his eyes. We were housed in the drunk tank—no other place was big enough to house us—and then released on our own recognizance. Later there would be a jury trial where we would be found guilty of a misdemeanor. We had a choice between a light fine and a week in jail. As I was in Tennessee when the sentence came down, I paid the fine.

Only years later did I fully appreciate how angry we were. Having grown up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” we felt like our country had betrayed us. Men our age were being sent to fight and die in a war that no one could satisfactorily justify.

Of course, the war wasn’t the only thing going on since college demanded a lot of us academically. The joke at Carleton was that, on the first day of class, you were two weeks behind, and it’s true that the courses were difficult. In that first year I took Composition, two British literature surveys, two interdisciplinary humanities courses (one in 5th century Athens, one in the Renaissance), two French literature survey courses, anthropology, geology, and an introductory history course on Nazi Germany. I was a willing and eager student, writing essays on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine for the early Brit Lit survey and grappling with T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land in the 20th century survey. But the only course that allowed me to connect with what was going on in our lives—the only course in which I truly caught fire—was the history course. I remember writing an essay on Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, which I tried to apply—not entirely successfully—to our own time. 

I would catch fire a second time my sophomore year in a course I took on the French Revolution. Carl Weiner, a charismatic professor who made the events come alive for us, assigned J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy for the final essay. There I had to reflect on how an intellectual like Robespierre, even when driven by the lofty ideal of a “republic of virtue,” could also usher in a bloody reign of terror. As I considered myself an intellectual, it prompted me to do some self-questioning—and to distance myself from the more radical leftists one encountered in those days, especially the Trotskyite Worker’s League, which had a small campus chapter.

The following year I journeyed to Normandy with a group of Carleton students, headed by Weiner, to study the Student-Worker Uprising of 1968. As this history was only three years old, there was still a lot of unrest and we had the opportunity to witness, first-hand, a student demonstration over worker rights that involved molotov cocktails and tear gas. The Maoists and the Trotskyites were quarreling, and I believe it was the more violent Maoists that captured a police van by throwing a molotov cocktail through the window, emptying it out. Then they drove it onto the University of Caen campus, where the police were not allowed, and parked it by a statue of a phoenix, symbol of Caen’s recovery from World War II bombing. As they burned it, everyone there lifted their left hand in a fist and sang the Communist “International.”

I add that the day ended somberly as a student was badly hurt from having been hit by a teargas canister. An ambulance had to come on campus to care for him and, as the day was ending, the protest ended there and then. We Americans, functioning as observers, felt like we had been a part of history.

Grappling with urgent concerns was not occurring in my English classes. In those days formalism reigned supreme, with scholars contending that literature rose above the dirty facts of history. I now realize that it was therefore almost inevitable that I would major in history, even though literature was my deepest love and even though I wasn’t interested in history’s drive to figure out what really happened. I was drawn to historical ideas, not historical facts, and so confined myself mostly to intellectual history courses. I was fortunate that I also had history professors who encouraged me to regard literary artifacts as prime source material. In Medieval History I I wrote an essay on “Beowulf and the Historical Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society” and in Medieval History II how author of Arthurian tales Chrétien de Troyes regarded adultery in 12th century France.

In my book I recount how the Beowulf essay was one of the most meaningful moments in my life. That’s because I saw a connection between literature and world-shaking events that my literature classes didn’t care about. It was not only that poems and stories reflected what was going on (although formalists didn’t even admit to that much) but that they provided people a way to negotiate the forces that were threatening to tear apart their societies.

The theorist who influenced me the most was the Italian activist Antonio Gramsci, whom I encountered in a course on Marxist thought: Gramsci spoke of the need for cultural workers (philosophers and poets), who could penetrate false consciousness and see class relations as they really were. Gramsci especially prized these cultural workers if they came from working class, and since I had begun dating my future wife at that time, we had fun labeling her (since she grew up on a farm) a Gramscian “organic intellectual.” For that class I would write a clarifying Gramsci-like “manifesto” of my beliefs.

Finally, for my senior thesis I contended that Enlightenment figures like Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot had a far more profound influence on the French Revolution than did the pamphlet writers of the day, even though the latter were in the thick of things and had an immediate impact.

In other words, faced with the Vietnam War and other momentous events of the day, I was looking for reassurance that someone who loved books and ideas could play an historical role. I had once been part of a lawsuit that integrated the Franklin County schools but now I was feeling impotent. My history classes provided me with a framework for exploring possibilities, my English classes not at all. 

What those literature classes gave me, however, were moments of aesthetic ecstasy missing from my more prosaic history courses. To this day I remember where I first encountered “Why this is hell nor am I out of it” and “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” and “One man loved the pilgrim soul in you” and “Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry.”*

For this reason, when I was writing my senior thesis I floated the idea that Rousseau and Diderot had the impact they did on the French Revolution because of the aesthetic quality of their works. The higher the literary quality of a work, I speculated, the greater the historical impact.

At that moment I decided I needed to go to graduate school to figure out if this was true.

*The lines are from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Eliot’s Waste Land, Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” and Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

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A Novel Predicted A.I., Zoom, the Internet

By Robin Bates | Published: November 5, 2025

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Thursday

Greg Olear at the Substack blog Prevail has alerted me to an E.M Forster dystopian novella that, in 1913-14, predicted our technological future far more accurately than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984. As Olear points out, in The Machine Stops

Forster foresaw the Internet, Zoom calls, bleeping notifications, well-honed HVAC systems, tech worship, globalization, Reddit boards, Yelp reviews, Spotify, YouTube, environment-destroying pollution, shitty automated customer service, psychological issues involving physical isolation, and more. 

About this astonishing perspicacity Olear observes, “maybe the future was always mapped out this way, for those visionaries sensitive enough to survey the undiscovered frontier.” If authors and poets have such sensitivity, I think it’s because (to borrow from Wordsworth) “they see into the life of things.” Above all, they see into the life of people and can imagine what they are capable of in various conditions. It’s an advantage they have over engineers and sociologists.

Machine Stops features a mother (Vashti) and her son (Kuno) who live in an underground world serviced by “the Machine,” which provides them with all necessities of life—or at least it does so until it starts breaking down. They are underground because the outside environment has been degraded to such an extent that it is no longer habitable. Vashti teaches remotely about safe subjects from the past (such as “Music from the Australian Period”) and is contented with her life remotely. Kuno, by contrast, feels confined and wants to explore the outside world, even though to do so is forbidden. In certain ways the story resembles the movie Matrix, with Kuno being a red pill guy. He works to expand his mother’s consciousness and, when the Machine fails, comes to her side.

The novella begins with a scenario that many who lived through the Covid pandemic can relate to:

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk – that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh – a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

At that point Vashti is essentially Skyping with Kuno, who is in Australia. (Remember, this was written in 1913!) He tells her he wants to see her in person rather than through “the wearisome Machine,” and when she says he must not say anything negative about the system that rules their lives, he replies, “You talk as if a god had made the Machine.” And then,

I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind. 

Her objection is that it will take two days by airship to reach him and that she will have to witness “the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark.” She complains, “I get no ideas in an airship.”

For a moment after Kuno hangs up she feels lonely, but she finds an instant way to escape her loneliness in a way that we can all relate to. First, the setting:

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. (My emphasis)

What happens next is what we happens when we return to our messages after having silenced our phone:

Vashanti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? – say this day month.

“Last three minutes” is a nice touch.

There’s even telemedicine in this world:

“Kuno,” she said, “I cannot come to see you. I am not well.”

Immediately an enormous apparatus fell on to her out of the ceiling, a thermometer was automatically laid upon her heart. She lay powerless. Cool pads soothed her forehead. Kuno had telegraphed to her doctor. 

So the human passions still blundered up and down in the Machine. Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor projected into her mouth, and the machinery retired into the ceiling. The voice of Kuno was heard asking how she felt. 

“Better.”

“The machine” has become so pervasive in Forster’s novella that people have started worshipping it:

Sitting up in the bed, she took [the instruction manual] reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if someone might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured ‘O Machine! O Machine!’ and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence. 

The machine doesn’t only provide services. Kino points out that it reconfigures the way we experience space itself:

“You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. 

Unfortunately, “man” in the novella has farmed out all that is lovable and desirable and strong to machines. And not only to machines, as Olear makes clear:

I worry because the Machine, in 2025, is owned and operated by some of the greediest, cruelest, least empathic men on the planet, who are doing everything in their power to accelerate our destruction. The Internet was conceived as a democratic space; it has become an oligarchy. A.I. was intended to help humanity; it may well stamp it out.

Because he is mostly focused on technology, Forster doesn’t deal with the men who run the machine. One must go to Orwell’s 1984 for that.

Further thought: For a related take on technology, my wife Julia has been conducting a class for our church on Becky Chambers’s Psalm for the Wild-Built. In the author’s more optimistic vision, when robots start becoming a full replacement for the human workforce rather than merely a supplement—when we “had bastardized constructs to the point that it was killing us”—they develop consciousness and walk away. Humanity is thereby saved as it is forced to revert to an earlier and healthier stage where the handcrafts flourish once again.

And yet another thought: Regarding how advancing technology reconfigures how we experience space, I am put in mind of the Ursula K. Le Guin short story “The Direction of the Road.” It is narrated by a oak tree, which complains that, with advancing speed technology, human beings notice trees less and less. Le Guin invokes the principle of relativity to make her point: 

I’d approach steadily but quite slowly [to the walking man], growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I’d finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size — sixty feet in those days — I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear. Not even the children were afraid of me, though often they kept their eyes on me as I passed by and started to diminish. Sometimes on a hot afternoon one of the adults would stop me right there at our meeting-place, and lie down with his back against mine for an hour or more.

This healthy relationship declines with the advent to the automobile and finally ends when someone is killed crashing into the tree:

It is not [the killing] that I protest. I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore have no regret. What I protest, what I cannot endure, is this: as I leapt at him, he saw me. He looked up at last. He saw me as I have never been seen before, not even by a child, not even in the days when people looked at things. He saw me whole, and saw nothing else — then, or ever.

He saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally.

“I am not death. I am life,” the tree complains, before throwing some serious shade at humans:

If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.

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They Oz You Up, Your Mandias

By Robin Bates | Published: November 4, 2025
Fragments of the Great Colossi (of Rameses II)

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Wednesday

Being in need of some humor at this dark time, I share today a poetic parody circulating on Bluesky that had me laughing out loud. Actually, as you will see, it is a double parody—two poems simultaneously parodied—and while you may know the two originals, I’ve included them below so that you’ll fully appreciate how much fun the parodist had. (I believe the author is Rose Ruane.)

First, there’s Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which I recently applied to Trump tarting up the White House with gold trim everywhere. (This was before we saw him level the East Wing for yet another vanity project.) 

Ozymandias
By Percy Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The other original also was the subject of a recent essay, Philip Larkin’s grim but highly quotable poem about child-rearing. That essay, incidentally, itself featured a parody of Larkin’s poem by someone with a more positive take on mum and dad. But here’s Larkin: 

This Be the Verse
By Phil Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Do you have all that? Now for the two combined. The final result reminds me of “Jabberwocky,” written by one of literature’s greatest parodists: 

They Oz You Up
By Rose Ruane (I think)

They Oz you up, your mandias
They may not mean to, but they do
They give you vast and trunkless legs
A sunken shattered visage too.

But they were ozzed up in their turn
by Mandias upon the sand
Who half the time had wrinkled lips
And half in sneering cold command.

Oz hands on mandias to man
Like mighty works upon the shelf
Look on them early as you can
Ye mighty and despair yourself.

So there you are.

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The Trap of Toxic Masculinity

By Robin Bates | Published: November 3, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addresses the nation’s generals

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Tuesday

Macho men who define themselves by their ability to control women don’t realize how vulnerable they make themselves. Literature is filled with examples, starting with every work that mentions cuckolding. These include Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”; Mallory’s Morte D’arthur; Shakespeare’s Othello, Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, and Winter’s Tale; John Donne’s “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star”; and William Wycherley’s Country Wife. “A horned man’s a monster and a beast,” asserts Othello, expressing his fears that he wears the imaginary horns of a cuckold, even though Desdemona is in fact faithful.

All a woman must do is sleep with a lover—or say that she has done so—to bring such fearful men to their knees. This is Mrs. Yonge’s final attack in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poem “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.” Montagu penned the angry poem after watching Mrs. Yonge’s philandering husband sue his wife for her own extramarital affair, winning both a divorce and her dowery money. Montagu imagines things Mrs. Yonge could have said in return, concluding with one final prediction.

This prediction is that, even though Mr. Yonge is groveling before some older woman in an effort to secure one of her young cousins as his next wife, he will never be sure that this second wife will be faithful. Rather, he is likely to detect in his progeny the features of General Churchill and Anthony Lowther, two notorious rakes. After all, if one wife has cheated on him, how does he know his next one won’t as well?

Your high ambition may be gratified,
Some cousin of her own be made your bride,
And you the father of a glorious race
Endowed with Ch——l’s strength and Low—r’s face.

Back when I was teaching a course on “Couples Comedy in the British Restoration and 18th Century,” we explored how male sexual anxiety has been a major driver of comedy. Laughter is one way we use to inoculate ourselves against our anxieties as it both releases the nervous tension and assures us that someone else is the butt of the ridicule. Wycherley’s play The Country Wife’s takes the anxiety to the extreme. But before dipping into it, let’s take a look at a couple of instances of our own insecure men waving their you-know-whats around in a show of bravado.

First there was White House advisor Stephen Miller channeling his inner Goebbels in a speech to Memphis police:

The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless, they have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough, they have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore, we are so much more hardcore than they are, and we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us. What do they have? They have nothing behind them. So we are gonna win, they’re gonna lose.

Then there was the Defense Secretary—or Secretary of War, as Pete Hegseth prefers to see himself—ordering the country’s military leadership to assemble so that he could strut before them. Here’s some of what he said:

Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision, and ferocity of the War Department. In other words, to our enemies, FAFO. If necessary, our troops can translate that for you.

It’s clear from his talk, as its clear from his previous statements, that women have no place in the military. He holds back his sexism only a little:

But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender-neutral. If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result. So be it.

Responding to charges of “toxic masculinity,” Hegseth tried to turn the adjective to his advantage:

On the topic of standards, allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders. Upholding and demanding high standards is not toxic. Enforcing high standards, not toxic leadership. Leading warfighters toward the goals of high, gender-neutral, and uncompromising standards in order to forge a cohesive, formidable and lethal Department of War is not toxic. It is our duty, consistent with our constitutional oath. 

Indeed, he couldn’t get enough of the word:

Real toxic leadership is endangering subordinates with low standards. Real toxic leadership is promoting people based on immutable characteristics or quotas, instead of based on merit. Real toxic leadership is promoting destructive ideologies that are an anathema to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we’re correcting that. That’s why today, at my direction, we’re undertaking a full review of the department’s definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying, and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.

Hegseth may have been thinking of the 2017 sexual assault charges directed against him in that last sentence. He paid the woman $50,000 to settle out of court. But back to Wycherley’s play.

The main character is Horner, who lives to put cuckold horns on husbands. (Side note: In 1977 I saw Albert Finney play Horner at London’s National Theater in a performance I will never forget.) Because all the husbands are worried about him, however, he has to come up with a new tactic to penetrate their defenses. He does so by getting a crooked doctor named Quack to swear that he has been rendered impotent by venereal disease.

When Quack wonders how the plan will work, given that the wives won’t have an interest in an impotent man, Horner observes, “If I can but abuse the husbands, I’ll soon disabuse the wives.” And so it plays out as the husbands welcome him into their homes, partly so they can gloat over him and partly so that he can chaperone their wives. In the end, the wives are sexually fulfilled and the men are all wearing cuckold horns. It’s a cynical but very witty play.

For his part, Hegseth appeared as insecure as Sir Jasper Fidget. It took a great deal of self-control for the generals—many of whom (unlike Hegseth) have experienced live fire—not to laugh at him. They certainly didn’t applaud, as both he and Trump noticed.

Putting comedy aside, however, I want to end with an Adrienne Rich poem that reveals the inner misery of men who are obsessed with the image of themselves as heroic knights. The first stanza captures how they want to be seen, the second shows how they feel inside, and the third wonders what it will take to free them of the metal/mental trap in which they have caged themselves:

The Knight

A knight rides into the noon,
and his helmet points to the sun,
and a thousand splintered suns
are the gaiety of his mail.
The soles of his feet glitter
and his palms flash in reply,
and under his crackling banner
he rides like a ship in sail.
 
A knight rides into the noon,
and his only eye is living,
a lump of bitter jelly
set in a metal mask,
betraying rags and tatters
that cling to the flesh beneath
and wear his nerves to ribbons
under the radiant casque.
 
Who will unhorse this rider
and free him from between
the walls of iron, the emblems
crushing his chest with their weight?
Will they defeat him gently,
or leave him hurled on the green,
his rags and wounds still hidden
under the great breastplate?

The second stanza captures the Millers and Hegseths of the world, who wear their nerves to ribbons over the fear that they are not genuine he-men. It reveals that hypermasculinity is toxic not only to women but to men as well.

Our so-called woke military, by contrast, is doing a pretty good job of understanding that real strength lies in character, intelligence, and resolve rather than bombastic posturing. Those qualities, they know, are distributed fairly evenly between the genders and are far more effective at keeping our country safe. The transition hasn’t been easy but, to apply Rich’s word, it has been comparatively gentle. The various measures designed to counter sexual harassment and assault forced the wounds out into the open, where they could be treated.

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DJT Goes Gatsby but Think Dickens

By Robin Bates | Published: November 2, 2025
Trump’s Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago

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Monday

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen the following passage from The Great Gatsby applied to the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations:

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . .

I’ve frequently turned to the passage myself, as I did here, here and here. It was therefore irony piled upon irony that Donald Trump held a Gatsby-themed party on the eve of the administration shutting down a food stamp program that serves 42 million people.

A different work that came to my mind as I heard about the affair, however. In Tale of Two Cities, social reformer Charles Dickens knows who is most responsible for the French Revolution. Like Trump, the French aristocracy are oblivious to the suffering of the lower classes.

Let’s start with Trump’s fête in Mar-a-Lago, described in a Dean Obeidallah blog post entitled “Trump throws himself a Great Gatsby party while people can’t even afford ketchup”:

This fête was titled, “A little party never killed nobody”—which was a reference to a song from the 2013 film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby. Photos from Trump’s party reveal people dressed in “Roaring 20’”s garb with feathers and flapper dresses, professional burlesque type dancers hired to entertain and even a scantily clad woman in a huge martini glass. 

The Guardian offers more details, including the fact that the event was to reward “nearly 130 deep-pocketed donors, allies and representatives of major companies for a dinner at the White House to reward them for their pledged contributions to a vast new ballroom now expected to cost $300m”:

It was a feast fit for a king – and any billionaire willing to be his subject. From gold-rimmed plates on gold-patterned tablecloths decorated with gold candlestick holders, they gorged on heirloom tomato panzanella salad, beef wellington and a dessert of roasted Anjou pears, cinnamon crumble and butterscotch ice-cream.

“That the federal government had shut down two weeks earlier,” the Guardian article adds, “scarcely seemed to matter.”

Dickens chooses a pampered Monseigneur to dramatize such extravagance in his novel. It requires four men, we are told, to provide him with his morning hot chocolate:

Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lackey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.

This Monseigneur appears to have Trump’s architectural tastes: we see him in a room “adorned with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve.” Furthermore, the party he throws sounds like the one Trump just hosted. “Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball,” the author tells us, “that was never to leave off”:

[A]ll the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far away.

Those surrounding the Monseigneur, meanwhile, sound a lot like Trump’s cabinet and advisors, starting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: 

Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score. 

The equivalents of Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought also make appearances:

People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur.

This Monseigneur cares as little for the common people as Trump does. We see this when he travels in his carriage:

It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the face, or to the lips, of the master. 

Nor does it bother him when he is presented with the results. When he learns that his carriage has killed a child, he of course blames the victim. The tall man in the passage is the boy’s father:

“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”

Then, as though nothing had happened, the Monseigneur

was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by.

We all know how Tale of Two Cities ends. Our own future is less certain.

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The Leaves Where You Walk Do Not Stir

By Robin Bates | Published: November 1, 2025
Vincent Van Gogh, The Walk – Falling Leaves

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Sunday – All Souls’ Day

I’ve just discovered and fallen in love with the quiet and reflective poetry of the English poet Frances Bellerby.  As today (Nov. 2) is All Souls’ Day, here’s a poem in which the speaker uses the occasion to remember a loved one. She imagines them walking together, as they once did, through autumn leaves that are, “in their death,/ brilliant as never before.”

In this walk of quiet contemplation, the speaker remembers past walks, where a summer never seemed lost “if two have been together/witnessing the variousness of light.” Sadly, that light is now gone as they enter “the year’s night,”—the stream flows quietly now and a spider has built its web across an “an unguarded door,” with the caught dewdrops no longer shimmering (“dull pearls”). “We well know, darling,” the speaker says, that “what the small day cannot hold/ must spill into eternity.” Time became “full, brimming” until it could hold no more.

It’s a beautiful moment that tugs at the heart. The speaker talks of moving forward quietly, cat-soft, so as not to disturb “scatheless” (unharmed) dead. Words have become unnecessary. She imagines holding the hand of her companion, who has always been “leaf-light,” and in this moment she feels no fear. “It seems as if a mist descends,” she reports, “and the leaves where you walk do not stir.”

All Souls’ Day
By Frances Bellerby

Let’s go our old way 
by the stream, and kick the leaves 
as we always did, to make 
the rhythm of breaking waves.

This day draws no breath – 
shows no color anywhere 
except for the leaves – in their death 
brilliant as never before.

Yellow of Brimstone Butterfly, 
brown of Oak Eggar Moth – 
you’d say. And I’d be wondering why 
a summer never seems lost

if two have been together 
witnessing the variousness of light, 
and the same two in lusterless 
November enter the year’s night…

The slow-worm stream – how still! 
Above that spider’s unguarded door, 
look – dull pearls…Time’s full, 
brimming, can hold no more.

Next moment (we well know, 
my darling, you and I) 
what the small day cannot hold 
must spill into eternity.

So perhaps we should move cat-soft 
meanwhile, and leave everything unsaid, 
until no shadow of risk can be left 
of disturbing the scatheless dead.

Ah, but you were always leaf-light. 
And you so seldom talk 
as we go. But there at my side 
through the bright leaves you walk.

And yet – touch my hand 
that I may be quite without fear, 
for it seems as if a mist descends, 
and the leaves where you walk do not stir.

It is a good time of year to go walking through the fallen leaves with someone who is dear to you—or even just by yourself—as you remember those souls who have moved on.

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For Halloween, Dickinson Matches Poe

By Robin Bates | Published: October 30, 2025
Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson

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Friday – Halloween

While we are more apt to associate Halloween with Edgar Allan Poe than Emily Dickinson, the “belle from Amherst” has poems that are very Poe-like. I shared one a few Halloweens ago: In “One need to be a chamber to be haunted,” she points out that no haunted house is as frightening as the human mind. “The brain has corridors surpassing/ Material place,” she notes. 

We are taken into these corridors in the two poems I have selected for today. In “‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch” she talks about what it is like to be on the verge of death. In it she may have in mind Poe’s horrifying “Descent into the Maelstrom,” although the whirlpool is even more malevolent in her case since it seems to be deliberate and calculated. For comparison’s sake, here’s a passage from the Poe story:

The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray ;  but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

Dickinson’s maelstrom, while terrifying, has a notch, which I interpret as getting tighter with every rotation. If so, it is like the pendulum in that other Poe story, where the blade comes closer to the victim’s chest with each swing. This is what it feels like, the poet indicates, when one is nearing death. It’s as though “a Goblin with a Gauge” is overseeing the entire operation, an executioner measuring out the hours and eventually the seconds.

That’s not the end of the torture, however. Just when the final hour appears to have come, with the speaker leaving the “Dungeon’s luxury of doubt” for the certainty of “the Gibbets, and the dead,” a reprieve is granted. “The Pit and the Pendulum” also features a last-minute rescue, but in Dickinson’s case, it’s unclear whether the reprieve is genuinely freeing or just another stage of the anguish. Here’s the poem:

‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch, 
That nearer, every Day, 
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel 
Until the Agony 

Toyed coolly with the final inch 
Of your delirious Hem 
And you dropt, lost, When something broke 
And let you from a Dream 

As if a Goblin with a Gauge 
Kept measuring the Hours 
Until you felt your Second 
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws 

And not a Sinew stirred could help, 
And sense was setting numb 
When God remembered and the Fiend 
Let go, then, Overcome 

As if your Sentence stood pronounced 
And you were frozen led 
From Dungeon’s luxury of Doubt 
To Gibbets, and the Dead 

And when the Film had stitched your eyes 
A Creature gasped Reprieve! 
Which Anguish was the utterest then 
To perish, or to live?

Rather than go through all this again, wouldn’t it be easier just to perish?

The narrator’s observations in Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum” work as a useful gloss on Dickinson’s poem. Of how the Spanish Inquisition is toying with him, the narrator writes,

To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice.

In another poem Dickinson provides instruction for defeating the horror of death: just look it full in the face and accept it. The truth of death may be bald and cold but grappling with it “will hold,” allowing us to conquer it. In contrast, “to scan a Ghost” leaves us faint. And in what could be read as a reference to Poe’s pendulum, she notes that it is “Suspense” sawing—and seesawing—away at us that we find tormenting. Here’s Poe:

Down — still unceasingly — still inevitably down! I gasped and struggled at each vibration. I shrunk convulsively at its every sweep. My eyes followed its outward or upward whirls with the eagerness of the most unmeaning despair; they closed themselves spasmodically at the descent, although death would have been a relief, oh! how unspeakable! Still I quivered in every nerve to think how slight a sinking of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening axe upon my bosom. It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver — the frame to shrink. It was hope — the hope that triumphs on the rack — that whispers to the death-condemned even in the dungeons of the Inquisition.

Dickinson’s speaker finds it exhilarating to move beyond hope (“Stop hoping, now”). Suddenly the Soul is secure and she need fear the cold grave no more. “Others, can wrestle–/ Yours, is done,” she asserts. If we cease bleakly dreading Woe and simply open our arms to it, we will set “the Fright at Liberty and free/ And Terror’s free.”

With this approach, it’s as though we have been granted a gay holiday from all of death’s horrors. Although having made her case, the poet must then admit that it’s also a ghastly holiday. That adverb casts doubt on the whole rest of the poem. She can’t altogether dismiss the subject.

‘Tis so appalling—it exhilarates—
So over Horror, it half Captivates—
The Soul stares after it, secure—
A Sepulcher, fears frost, no more—

To scan a Ghost, is faint—
But grappling, conquers it—
How easy, Torment, now—
Suspense kept sawing so—

The Truth, is Bald, and Cold—
But that will hold—
If any are not sure—
We show them—prayer—
But we, who know,
Stop hoping, now—

Looking at Death, is Dying—
Just let go the Breath—
And not the pillow at your Cheek
So Slumbereth—

Others, Can wrestle—
Yours, is done—
And so of Woe, bleak dreaded—come,
It sets the Fright at liberty—
And Terror’s free—
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!

I wonder if today’s partying, with all its skeletons, corpses, and murderous monsters, is a ritual way of facing up to our fears of death. It is indeed a gay and ghastly holiday. Happy Halloween!

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Existentialism for High School Seniors

By Robin Bates | Published: October 29, 2025

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Thursday

I’ve moved up my weekly memoir to give over tomorrow’s slot to Halloween. (Prepare to be terrified by two gothic Emily Dickinson poems!) I focus on my senior year at the Sewanee Military Academy because of our deep dive into existential authors in Will Solie’s Senior English and J. R. McDowell’s Senior Religion. I vividly recall McDowell’s capstone assignment—we were to describe our values—which served to crystallize my thinking in a way that, four years later, my senior thesis would do at Carleton College.

I begin with a flashback to an overheard teacher-student conversation my first year about T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I was immediately intrigued. Eliot may be describing a midlife crisis but in the process he also appeals to adolescents caught in their own identity confusion. The lines “There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” and “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” especially hit home.  

“Prufrock” was just a foretaste of what was to come. Solie gave us a heavy dose of existential authors, especially Sartre (No Exit), Camus (various short stories), Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Ibsen’s Wild Duck, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Meanwhile, in McDowell’s Religion class we read Sophocles’s and then Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, Christopher Frye’s The Sleep of Soldiers, Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell (from Man and Superman), and Camus’s The Stranger. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros showed up somewhere in there as well. Some of us on the literary magazine wanted to be Camus and tried our hand at existential parables.

Grim though many of these works are, they matched my mood for much of the year as I was increasingly tired of the military. One issue was a commandant intent on having misbehaving cadets walk penalty tours. I, who had mostly avoided getting disciplined, ended up marching an hour’s tour for wearing a pair of shoes that had lost their tongues. (When the inspecting officer barked, “Bates, your shoes have no tongues” I, playing the smart aleck, replied, “They have nothing to say, sir,” which didn’t’ go down well. But I didn’t want to hit up my parents for new military shoes when the year was almost over.) 

Adding to my woes was the worst case of acne that my dermatologist had ever seen (so he informed me), which contributed to my low esteem and lack of a love life. So while I plunged into my studies and extracurricular activities (tennis would be particularly important, as would the newspaper), I still felt lonely, lost, and confused. Then again, as I was to learn decades later, this was probably the norm for everyone at the school.

I owe my psychological understanding to a “Film and Adolescence” course I team-taught in the 2000’s with psychologist Barbara Bershon. She informed me that teens are simultaneously going through four major life transitions, any one of which would bring their parents to their knees: neurological (their brains are growing but they don’t know how to use the new capacity yet), physiological (their bodies are going crazy, both inwardly and outwardly), social (they are no longer children but don’t know what they are instead), and cognitive (they’re moving from concrete to abstract thinking but haven’t het mastered the latter). No issue is more urgent that identity formation.

For someone who spent much of his time in his head, existential fiction and Eliot poems like “Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men” spoke to these changes. Their somewhat cold treatment of emotions (“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure”), along with the existentialists’ frequent choice of allegory over realism, held at bay the swirling emotions that threatened to drown me. This in turn gave my brain the distance it needed to examine the big existence questions that were flooding in. As a child, I had assumed my parents had all the answers, but now I realized we all must wrestle with the issues on our own. The prospect was both exhilarating and terrifying.

Of course, death is one of existence’s greatest challenges and I chose to make it the focus of an independent study required for Senior English. In the essay I looked at John Donne’s Sonnet 10 (“Death, Be Not Proud”), Shakespeare’s “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun” (from Cymbeline), Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell,” e. e. cummings’s “Buffalo Bill’s Defunct,” and other works. Since I hadn’t lost anyone close, however, the topic engaged me only intellectually, not emotionally. This unfortunately would characterize many of my essays over the next twenty years. 

I say unfortunate because I missed out on many opportunities to grapple with subjects that would have meant more to me. I burnished by academic credentials by exercising my abstract thinking muscles but something important was missing. I was like Robert Browning’s Andrea Del Sarto, a painter whose art is technically proficient but lacks soul.

Why was I like this? Perhaps the very books that provided me with a refuge also kept me from descending into the messy world of feelings. While I don’t want to blame everything on my British ancestors, my family was marked by a very British reserve so that we buried our emotions as much as we could. For the longest time we didn’t even hug or enjoy being touched. A number of fictional works feature the reserved British male—Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne’s Phineas Fogg, Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day butler—and I have experienced a flash of recognition each time I have encountered these characters.

Any number of books warn the stories can be a double-edged sword, from Don Quixote to Northanger Abbey to Madame Bovary. I’ll touch in future posts on my complicated dance with reality. One of the biggest developments in the course of my life has involved connecting my emotional life and my reading life, with a few notable exceptions, that didn’t start happening until my late thirties. More on that in essays to come.

I’ll just note here that, if literature sometimes held me back, it also helped me figure out what to do next when I needed to make adjustments. The bildungsroman or growth story proved especially critical in this process.

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