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Monday
At the recommendation of blogger Greg Olear, I’ve been reading Percy Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester, which both describes our current political situation and advises us on how to respond. That response, you’ll be heartened to know, resembles the No Kings marches and other acts of peaceful resistance we’ve been witnessing to the ICE raids and other assaults on the Constitution.
In drawing historical parallels, it’s true we haven’t seen anything quite as dramatic as the 1819 Manchester massacre, when British cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had peacefully assembled—many in Sunday attire with wives and children—to demand reform of parliamentary representation. 18 people were killed and 400-700 injured. Instead we are seeing a slow-rolling massacre, whether in the form of ICE raids tearing apart families and neighborhoods or extrajudicial killings in international waters. In both instances, however, we are witnessing anarchy, with Trump and his minions overriding law, decency and the Constitution as they impose their will. Anarchy, Shelley points out, has many enablers.
I will be choosing passages from this lengthy poem of George III’s England and Trump’s America matching up. The poem, Shelley tells us, comes to him in a vision—he was in Italy at the time—and goes on to describe a masquerade presided over by the skeletal figure of Anarchy. In his train are three of the major politicians that had a hand in the Manchester massacre, along with “bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies.” Or as we call them nowadays, pastors, lawyers, billionaires, and the surveillance state.
The figure of Anarchy presides over them all and has Trump-like pretensions. He even uses all-caps!
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a scepter shone;
On his brow this mark I saw–
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’
Like Trump, Anarchy despoils everything he encounters, including his own followers (as many of those who voted for him are now discovering). The reference to Anarchy’s followers being “drunk as with intoxication/ Of the wine of desolation” brings to mind Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Robert Kennedy, Elon Musk, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and other Trump minions, who are gleefully wreaking havoc:
With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood,
The adoring multitude.
And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.
And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.
O’er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.
The first response to Anarchy’s assault is panic:
And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.
Meanwhile, Anarchy finds sympathetic ears amongst “hired murders” (let’s call them ICE agents), along with lawyers (the Supreme Court, law firms he has bullied) and priests (again, MAGA pastors):
For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
`Thou art God, and Law, and King.
We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.’
Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering — `Thou art Law and God.’ —
Then all cried with one accord,
`Thou art King, and God, and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’
Anarchy, meanwhile, figures that everything in the nation is “rightly his”: the palaces (White House), the bank (the Treasury), the Tower (the Department of Justice), Parliament (Congress):
And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to everyone,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.
For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the scepter, crown, and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.
So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament
At this point, however, the poem takes a turn in a more positive direction, with Hope making an appearance. To be sure, at first the poet tells us that “she looked more like Despair,” and she’s unhappy that the passage of Time doesn’t appear to be improving matters. For the anti-Trump resistance, that’s certainly how it felt in the early months of Trump’s presidency:
When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:
`My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
`He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me–
Misery, oh, Misery!’
At this point, however, Hope engages in passive, non-violent resistance. It is this turn in the poem that caught the attention of Gandhi, who according to Wikipedia was so inspired by the poem that he would quote passages to vast audiences during the campaign for a free India. Language from the poem was also recited by students at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and by protesters in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Somewhat like the Chinese protester who placed himself before a line of tanks, Hope
lay down in the street,
Right before the horses’ feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye,
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.
In our own country, I think of neighbors and townships, early on, coming to the aid of ICE victims. Since then, their resistance has blossomed into seven million rallying in protest. As Shelley describes it, what begins as a little mist grows into a towering cloud that resembles “a Shape arrayed in mail.” While the shape is not tangible—hope is not something that people can point to—nevertheless we feel its presence and are buoyed up by it. It awakens as flowers awaken in May, as stars appear in the sky, as “waves arise when loud winds call.”
When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapor of a vale:
Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky,
It grew — a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper’s scale,
And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.
On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning’s, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.
With step as soft as wind it passed
O’er the heads of men — so fast
That they knew the presence there,
And looked, — but all was empty air.
As flowers beneath May’s footstep waken,
As stars from Night’s loose hair are shaken,
As waves arise when loud winds call,
Thoughts sprung where’er that step did fall
Hope was marching along with the No Kings protesters:
And the prostrate multitude
Looked — and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope, that maiden most serene,
Was walking with a quiet mien…
Just as Hope reminds England of its commitment to freedom, so Hope reminds Americans of our roots in the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution:
Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.
In reminding his readers of their roots, Shelley isn’t done with describing what slavery looks like. The next three passages describe perfectly the effects of the Big Beautiful Bill, with its tax cuts for billionaires and draconian cuts for everyone else. In the poem, people hunger for the scraps that the rich man throws to his dogs, while the money made from the toil of workers is beyond what tyrants of old could imagine. Crypto currency, meanwhile—which has turned the Trump family into billionaires—is today’s version of “paper coin”:
‘Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye;
`Tis to let the Ghost of Gold
Take from Toil a thousandfold
More than e’er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.
Paper coin — that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.
In pushing back against such oppression, Shelley counsels protesters to be guided by “Science, Poetry, and Thought” and to gird themselves with “Spirit, Patience, and Gentleness.” His vision of a mass movement is very much what we saw with No Kings, where people came “from every hut, village and town”—say, from my own Winchester, Tennessee to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles:
Science, Poetry, and Thought
Are thy lamps; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
So serene, they curse it not.
Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless
Art thou — let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.
Let a great Assembly be
Of the fearless and the free
On some spot of English ground
Where the plains stretch wide around.
Let the blue sky overhead,
The green earth on which ye tread,
All that must eternal be
Witness the solemnity.
From the corners uttermost
Of the bonds of English coast;
From every hut, village, and town
Where those who live and suffer moan
For others’ misery or their own.
Further on, as he talks of our anger at seeing our country “bought and sold/ With a price of blood and gold,” he urges us to bring “strong and simple words.” One thinks of the signs that protesters carried with them:
Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold–
Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free–
Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.
If we do this, Shelley predicts, we will be able to resist “the clash of clanging wheels,/ And the tramp of horses’ heels.” Anticipating Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he advocates meeting violence with non-violence:
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.
Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.
Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand–
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.
And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.
We can resist panic, he says, because we have the rule of law—and in America, the Constitution—to buoy us up:
And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armèd steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.
Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute,
The old laws of England – they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo — Liberty!
In the end, Shelley predicts, those who stand strong in the face of oppression—even those who die—will reap a final victory. Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, once asserted that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” and Shelley ends his poem with a similar sentiment, returning to the image of slumbering lions awakened:
And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again — again — again–
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number–
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many — they are few.
In our Winchester rally, at certain times we chanted, “We are the people!” I thought at the time that it was an audacious claim, given that Trump won 76% of the vote in our country. Yet I doubt that 76% of the people were voting for the anarchy that is being unleashed upon the country at the moment and that will start showing up in inflation, rising health insurance costs, cuts to programs upon which our Appalachian population rely, and so on. Our church’s free food program is already seeing a dramatic increase in applications. I suspect that most of us, Republicans as well as Democrats, would agree with the following definition of freedom:
For the laborer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labor come
In a neat and happy home.
Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude–
No — in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.
Maybe our claim that we represent the nation isn’t so outrageous after all.
