They Shoot Puppies, Don’t They?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 30, 2024
Garth Williams, illus. from Charlotte’s Web

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Wednesday

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, writing about Trump policies separating migrant children from their parents and putting them in cages, once noted that “the cruelty is the point.” The observation has become a powerful way to understand the MAGA movement: many are not attracted to Trump in spite of his sadism but because of it.

This in turn helps explain why South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who wants to be Trump’s vice-president, boasted in her bio about shooting her puppy Cricket. Perhaps Noem figured this would endear herself to the former president, who has a well-known dislike of dogs.

Noem grew up on a farm, where killing animals is sometimes necessary. Not that this makes such tasks necessarily easier. My wife talks about the challenge of killing chickens when she was growing up on a small southeastern Iowa farm. I’m also sure that I’m not the only child who was traumatized by the Garth Williams illustration in Charlotte’s Webb of Fern holding off her axe-wielding father as he goes after Wilbur, the runt of the litter.

E.B. White’s book is powerful in part because it acknowledges the stark reality at play in rural America. It’s a fact of life that farm-raised pigs do not have a spider advocate to save them from their destined end. Charlotte’s Web is noteworthy as a children’s book because it has the courage to grapple with life and death issues.

Sometimes dogs too must be put down, such as Old Yeller in Fred Gipson’s novel, who saves the family from a rabid wolf but contracts the illness in the process. There’s also the rabid dog in To Kill a Mockingbird, a foreshadowing of the “rabid” Bob Ewell, who assaults his daughter and blames an innocent Black man for it.

Perhaps most powerfully, there’s the tragic story of the sheepdog-in-training, young George, in Far from the Madding Crowd. Instead of rounding up the flock, George stampedes them over a cliff, rendering the kindly Gabriel Oak an instant pauper:

With a sensation of bodily faintness [Gabriel] advanced: at one point the rails were broken through, and there he saw the footprints of his ewes. The dog came up, licked his hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward for signal services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The ewes lay dead and dying at its foot—a heap of two hundred mangled carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two hundred more.

Gabriel, we learn, is so humane that he feels “an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep” when he has to turn one into mutton. After first feeling a deep pity for his decimated flock, he is then faced with the enormity of his loss:

It was a second to remember another phase of the matter. The sheep were not insured. All the savings of a frugal life had been dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an independent farmer were laid low—possibly forever. Gabriel’s energies, patience, and industry had been so severely taxed during the years of his life between eighteen and eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of progress that no more seemed to be left in him. He leant down upon a rail, and covered his face with his hands.

In spite of his loss, however, he still feels for young George, who only thought he was doing his job:

As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better, …collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.

Hardy doesn’t hold back on the injustice of it all:

George’s son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o’clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

If Noem had killed Cricket in such a setting, she would be forgiven. In her book, however, she makes the killing personal:

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket tried to bite her, proving herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”

Then, to further prove her ruthlessness, she writes about shooting an unruly goat immediately afterwards.

It’s not as though she didn’t have other options. One animal rights group laid them out.

“There’s no rational and plausible excuse for Noem shooting a juvenile dog for normal puppy-like behavior,” said a statement from Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “If she is unable to handle an animal, ask a family member or a neighbor to help. If training and socializing the dog doesn’t work, then give the dog to a more caring family or to a shelter for adoption.

Sometimes animals have to be put down, although even in seemingly clear instances there can be moral complications, as George Orwell makes clear in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” But Noem, in a book designed as a campaign advertisement, is uninterested in nuance. She wants to show the MAGA faithful, and to show Donald Trump, that she is one mean motherf***er.

In other words, the cruelty is the point.

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Remembering My Eldest 24 Years Later

By Robin Bates | Published: April 29, 2024
Justin’s grave, overlooking the St. Mary’s River (photo by Betsy Bates)

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Tuesday

Our eldest son Justin died 24 years ago on this day, which means that every year, just when life is bursting forth, I turn my thoughts to death. Feeling exuberant on a beautiful spring day—the first sunny day in weeks—Justin flung himself, fully clothed, into a spot in the St. Mary’s River where he had swum as a child. Unfortunately, months of rain had unexpectedly created dangerous currents, one of which caught him and dragged him under. He was 21.

Mary Oliver’s poem “No Voyage” captures the thoughts of those who have been left behind. Like the speaker I remember lying by an open window, a gentle spring breeze blowing in, and feeling like “land used up.” I too thought of mourners who had gone before, “board[ing] ship with grief among their maps”–but feeling that, like Oliver, I too wasn’t prepared to move on (“No Voyage”), even though the land beneath me was shifting. And like her, my “wanting life” seemed at an end as nothing—“no novelty and no disguise of distance”—offered me anything. I felt an inhabitant—Oliver uses the word “citizen” to emphasize a sense of obligation—in a fallen city.

I relate to other sentiments in the poem. Where Oliver talks of birds in the trees singing of the circle of time, I would often look out at the spring growth—at the grass, kudzu, catbrier, and spring foliage—and marvel at how life, relentlessly, kept on asserting itself, even in this season of death.

Also, like Oliver, I wondered if I could “inherit from disaster.” Would my life be forever blighted, I wondered, or could I turn the tragedy into something that would prove a blessing for others?

Finally, I too found it of utmost importance “to sort the weeping ruins of my house.” I wasn’t impatient to move past the pain I was feeling. While (luckily) no one told me I would “get over” my grief, I would have ignored them if they had. The most important thing, I felt, was to experience grief in all its dimensions. If Grendel’s Mother was going to pull me down into her underwater cave, I was determined to pay attention to every aspect of that journey. There would be no icing over.*

Of course, I knew that others in my situation had voyaged beyond their grief—as I now have done—but I declared to myself at the time that there would be no premature moving on. I would “make peace” with Justin’s death, either “here or nowhere.”

Here’s the poem:

No Voyage
By Mary Oliver

I wake earlier, now that the birds have come
And sing in the unfailing trees.
On a cot by an open window
I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?—
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance;
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can,
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

Unlike her later and better-known nature poems, “No Voyage” has the feel of classic poetry, echoing some of the great elegies. Like John Milton in “Lycidas” and Alan Tate in “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” she invokes the surrounding foliage. Like Percy Shelley in Adonais (“a quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst/ As it has ever done, with change and motion”) and Alfred Lord Tennyson in In Memoriam (“The seasons bring the flower again,/ And bring the firstling to the flock”), she references the cycle of life. And like T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, she sees irony in death intruding itself in springtime:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

For us, April really did prove to be the cruelest month and I thought of the poem at the time. But unlike Eliot, who castigates the month for arousing painful emotions, I feared dull numbness more than pain. Searing grief seemed to be the only way I could imagine doing justice to the momentousness of what had occurred.

Or to return to Oliver’s poem, I saw sorting through “the weeping ruins of my house” as my most pressing task.

*On my Beowulf reference: In the past and in my forthcoming book, I do a deep dive into how Beowulf came to my aid in my grief. I see Grendel’s Mother as one of literature’s great archetypes for grief. When she pulls Beowulf down into her underwater lair and tears at his heart, it’s a symbol for how grief pulls us under. The lake is frozen on the top but burns hot underneath. I drew inspiration from Beowulf, who leaps into the lake rather than remaining in a frozen state on the shore. “I will ride this epic journey of grieving wherever she takes me,” I remember saying to myself after revisiting the poem.

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Trumpian Darkness or True Light? Choose

By Robin Bates | Published: April 28, 2024

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Monday

As I keep up with developments of Donald Trump’s election interference trial, I am struck by those former members of his inner circle who have escaped. Michael Cohen, who may testify against him this week, seems much more comfortable with himself now that he is no longer serving as Trump’s fixer, bully, and enforcer.

In contrast, I think of all those, some with ivy league educations, who continue to sell their souls to support the Trump cult, figures like Elise Stefanik, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, and J.D. Vance. And this brings me to Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World.”

It’s a religious poem but today I read it in a non-religious way, just as one can appreciate Dante’s Divine Comedy, Doctor Faustus, and other soul-selling dramas even if one doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife.

Granted, these works can certainly be read as warnings that God will punish us if we’re bad, but there is much more to them than this. Think of them also as psychological accounts of what happens to us when, for the sake of power and other gratifications, we abandon integrity, truth-telling, compassion, morality, and common decency. In other words, I see them more as descriptions rather than prescriptions. When we acquire, say, power by dubious means, we may experience a short-term high, but the end result is a hollowing out that blocks our way to true contentment.

Or as Henry Vaughan puts it,

 O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day…

When Vaughan writes, in the opening line, “I saw Eternity the other night, /Like a great ring of pure and endless light,/ All calm, as it was bright,” I see him as envisioning a peace that passes all understanding. It is a peace not available to all the tortured souls that Vaughan describes in his poem.

Among these are those driven by sexual lust, by hunger for power, by avarice, shallow gratification, and consumerism (“trivial wares enslave”). For present purposes, let’s look at the power-hungry statesman, who is “hung with weights and woe” and works underground to “clutch his prey.” His actions have cast an eclipse upon his soul as he feeds off of corruption and lies. “It rain’d about him blood and tears,” Vaughan tells us, and “he drank them as free.”

 Here’s the poem:

The World
By Henry Vaughan

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit’s sour delights,
With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,
Yet his dear treasure
All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flow’r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,
He did not stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,
Work’d under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see
That policy;
Churches and altars fed him; perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves;
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugg’d each one his pelf;
The downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,
And scorn’d pretence,
While others, slipp’d into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despised Truth sate counting by
Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;
But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
But as I did their madness so discuss
One whisper’d thus,
“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,
But for his bride.”

Those who have pulled free of Trumpism’s “dead and dark abode” find themselves breathing easier, no longer forced to twist themselves into soul-wrenching rationalizations for his behavior. Whether or not they feel that they are treading the sun, their step is lighter. They have moved beyond the madness.

My only quarrel with the poem is the final contention that such enlightenment is only available to the elect, who according to Calvinist doctrine have been pre-chosen by God while everyone else is headed for hell. I go rather with Vaughan’s initial impulse, that we all have it within us to prefer virtue over vice, despite sin’s attractions. Whatever short-term gratification comes from perpetual rage, we don’t have to be trapped by our resentment. We all of us can choose otherwise.

And I think Vaughan believes this as well, despite the whispering. After all, why write the poem at all if we cannot escape the madness? He’s giving us a chance to tread the paths of righteousness.

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When Shepherds Fail Their Flocks

By Robin Bates | Published: April 27, 2024
4th Century Roman sculpture of the Good Shepherd

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Sunday

Last Sunday was Good Shepherd Sunday, but I postponed that essay until today so that I could share a Passover poem. Today’s essay came out of a discussion I had with Sue Schmidt, with whom I talk weekly about the lectionary readings. With this arrangement, I gather ideas for my blog while she does the same for her sermon at the Salem United Church of Christ in Harrisburg PA, where she is the pastor.

Sue brought to our talk all the passages from the Bible that mention shepherds. There are a lot of them, with “shepherd” at some point in history becoming synonymous with “leader.” She was particularly struck by Ezekiel 34, where the prophet chastises Israel’s “shepherds,” and we discussed those contemporary church leaders who are failing their congregations.

Declining church attendance may be in part due to young Americans associating the church with child abuse, mammon worship, political extremism, Trump worship, homophobia, indifference to asylum seekers and the poor, and other issues. Ezekiel’s time, of course, had its own examples of church leaders straying from the paths of righteousness:

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: `This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.

Ezekiel is also critical of misbehaving congregation members, criticism that could be extended to all too many American Christians:

As for you, my flock, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will judge between one sheep and another, and between rams and goats. Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?

Must my flock feed on what you have trampled and drink what you have muddied with your feet? “`Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says to them: See, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you shove with flank and shoulder, butting all the weak sheep with your horns until you have driven them away, I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another.

Then comes the Lord’s promise to the righteous:

I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign LORD. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice.

So, rich grazing land for those who follow the Lord and condemnatory judgment for those who don’t—and by following the Lord, it’s not enough to talk the talk. There must be no “ravening wolves” in “sheep’s clothing,” as Matthew puts in (7:15). In talking over the matter with Sue, I brought up two poems that address church failure. In Stanley Moss’s “The Good Shepherd,” the speaker points out that shepherds can sometimes turn out to be butchers.

To be sure, the shepherd in Moss’s poem at first seems to fit the ideal:

The Good Shepherd
By Stanley Moss

Because he would not abandon the flock for a lost sheep
after the others had bedded down for the night,
he turned back, searched the thickets and gullies.
Sleepless, while the flock dozed in the morning mist
he searched the pastures up ahead. Winter nearing,
our wool heavy with brambles, ropes of muddy ice,
he did not abandon the lost sheep, even when the snows came.

Things can change, however, and in horrifying ways:

Still, I knew there was only a thin line
between the good shepherd and the butcher.
How many lambs had put their heads between the shepherd’s knees,
closed their eyes, offering their neck to the knife?
Familiar – the quick thuds of the club doing its work.

With this prospect in mind, Moss runs as fast as he can when he sees “the halo coming”:

More than once at night I saw the halo coming.
I ran like a deer and hid among rocks,
or I crawled under a bush, my heart in thorns.

During the day I lived my life in clover
watching out for the halo.
I swore on the day the good shepherd catches hold,
trying to wrestle me to the ground and bind my feet,
I will buck like a ram and bite like a wolf,
although I taste the famous blood
I will break loose! I will race under the gates of heaven,
back to the mortal fields, my flock, my stubbled grass and mud.

 The famous blood would be “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation,” while the halo is the church. As this speaker sees it, Christianity wants us to abandon love of this world for love of the next. Faced with this choice, he will hang on to this world, thank you very much. The fields to which he runs may be “mortal” and characterized by “stubbled grass and mud,” but he prefers them to the earth-denying “gates of heaven.”

Now, I’ve written many times that I myself see Jesus’s ministry as focused on our life here on earth, not on some future pearly gate existence. While I understand why Moss would be skeptical of churches, I would want to reassure him that “Thy kingdom come” is the kingdom we should strive for while we are still alive. If I were to rewrite this poem, I would contend that the “mortal fields” and the “stubbled grass and mud” are heaven.

In “I Am the Good Shepherd,” Malcolm Guite focuses on those church leaders who have failed the Stanley Mosses of the world. “The very name of shepherd seems besmeared,” the Anglican rector poet laments.

The poem, he says, was written in response to stories of clerical sexual abuse. “The cry of pain which forms the first half of my sonnet,” he explains, “turns to prayer, and to a return to the true essence and understanding of the word ‘pastor’ in Jesus’ promise to be our shepherd.”

In the end Guite prays “that Christ himself will in the end rescue and heal all those who have suffered, and especially perhaps those who have suffered at the hands of false shepherds.”

I Am the Good Shepherd 
John 10:11 I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. 

When so much shepherding has gone so wrong,
So many pastors hopelessly astray,
The weak so often preyed on by the strong,
So many bruised and broken on the way,
The very name of shepherd seems besmeared,
The fold and flock themselves are torn in half,
The lambs we left to face all we have feared
Are caught between the wasters and the wolf.
 
Good Shepherd now your flock has need of you,
One finds the fold and ninety-nine are lost
Out in the darkness and the icy dew,
And no one knows how long this night will last.
Restore us; call us back to you by name,
And by your life laid down, redeem our shame.

I’m thinking that “the wasters and the wolf” are the dissolute clergy on the one hand and life’s predatory forces on the other. The church should provide a refuge from the wolves of the world. Or as Ezekiel puts it, “My flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals.”

In Guite’s telling, 99 sheep out of the 100 are lost, not just one. While negative feelings towards organized religion aren’t quite this statistically bad, we are moving in that direction. So what can we do?

We the shepherds, Guite tells us, must ask God for guidance. In sending us a special shepherd, he gives us a chance to “redeem our shame” and be restored—which is to say, to reconnect with our inner divinity. As Psalm 23 puts it,

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Now there’s a vision to embrace. The good news is that I know many church shepherds (including Sue) who can help us get there.

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Would Willy Loman Be a Trump Supporter?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 25, 2024
Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman

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Friday

Here’s a comparison I never expected to make: Donald Trump as Willie Loman. A blog post by political scientist John Stoehr about the former president’s dwindling crowd sizes put me in mind of Charley’s famous eulogy at the end of Death of a Salesman. Commenting on the Manhattan trial, Stoehr observes,

The main event isn’t as interesting to me as the smaller moments, like this: Trump has been trying to get more people to show up at his trial. I don’t mean family. (They seem to have given up on him.) I mean people he truly needs. (He seems to believe they love him.) But crowds of “protesters” are shrinking in size as rapidly as crowds at his campaign rallies. It’s a visible sign of dwindling public support. For a showman and con artist like him, that’s unthinkable. So, naturally, he lies.

Here are the words of Willy’s longtime friend, delivered following a putdown by Willie’s oldest son:

CHARLEY: Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a Shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Now, there are many reasons why one dast blame Donald Trump. But a more relevant point is that what Willie’s longtime friend says of him could just as easily be said about authoritarian strongmen: their narcissism craves the adoration of crowds, without which they see themselves as nothing. What Biff says of his father could be said of Trump: “He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong,” and “He never knew who he was.”

Like Trump, Willy divides people into winners and losers (and can’t bear it when he realizes he is one of the losers), and he has inflated visions of success. Both men are dreamers. But Willy would never rape women, stiff contractors, or spur people to commit acts of violence. Also he cares about other people, including his family, for whom he commits suicide so that they collect on his life insurance.

The value of applying Miller’s play to our current political situation, I think, is that it helps explain Trump’s extraordinary hold over a large segment of the American population. Death of a Salesman is one of the great literary depictions of the American dream, and Trump’s power lies in his ability to sell a version of that dream to his followers. As a result, they will buy whatever he’s selling and forgive him when they come up empty. Currently he’s out to convince people that they were better off four years ago than they are today, and even though hundreds were dying daily in 2020 while unemployment was skyrocketing, many of them believe him.

Of Willy’s two sons, Biff is the realist, Happy the dreamer. I imagine Biff as Joe Biden, shaking his head as Happy spins fantasies:

BIFF: Why don’t you come with me, Happy?
HAPPY: I’m not licked that easily. I’m staying right in this city, and I’m gonna beat this racket! (He looks at Biff, his chin set.) …
BIFF: I know who I am, kid.
HAPPY: All right, boy. I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.

The odds of Happy ending up as “number-one” are about high as people becoming rich by purchasing stock in Trump’s media company or enrolling in Trump University. But America has always been a country of dreamers—many gambled life and limb to come to this country—and Trump has successfully plugged into their fantasies. For them, he is Willy’s brother Ben, who supposedly went to Africa and came out with diamonds. Conman though he may be, Trump rode his con all the way to the presidency.

I guess what I’m saying is that Charley sees something in Willy’s dreaming that is quintessentially American and that the Biffs of the world fail to appreciate. Unfortunately, when an authoritarian demagogue successfully taps into that dreaming, he can take the whole country down with him.

Maybe instead of comparing Trump to Willy, I should instead say that Trump would probably get Willy’s enthusiastic support. And perhaps drain his bank account in the process.

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Toad and Trumpian Politics

By Robin Bates | Published: April 24, 2024
E.H. Shepard, Toad Steals a Motorcar

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Thursday

Donald Trump’s election interference trial is reminding us of the ugliness of the 2016 election. Not only did the National Inquirer serve as an arm of the Trump campaign, using its wide reach to savage Hilary Clinton. As editor David Pecker has testified, following an August 2015 meeting with Trump and Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, The Inquirer agreed to publish only positive stories about Trump and only negative ones about his rivals.

This became evident over the course of the following year. With surgeon Ben Carson, it ran a front page story, “Ben Carson butchered my brain!”,  claiming that Carson had left a sponge in a person’s brain during a procedure.  With Cruz it was even worse. At one time the Inquirer baselessly accused him of having multiple affairs, at another of connection with a porn star. But the ultimate insult was when, next to a grainy photo of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, the newspaper printed the headline, “Ted Cruz father linked to JFK assassination!”

On the witness stand this past week, David Pecker acknowledged that all the stories were made up.

So how did Cruz react? Well, at first he was outraged, calling  Trump an “amoral pathological liar” and a “braggadocious, arrogant buffoon.” After Trump won the GOP nomination while Cruz was booed by conventioneers for complaining about his treatment, however, Cruz began behaving like Toad of Toad Hall in Wind in the Willows. First here’s the moment when a motorcar first makes its appearance, shattering the bucolic silence like Trump upending the GOP establishment:

The “Poop-poop” rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.

Traditional Republicans were taken off guard:

The old grey horse, dreaming, as he plodded along, of his quiet paddock, in a new raw situation such as this, simply abandoned himself to his natural emotions. Rearing, plunging, backing steadily, in spite of all the Mole’s efforts at his head, and all the Mole’s lively language directed at his better feelings, he drove the cart backward towards the deep ditch at the side of the road. It wavered an instant—then there was a heart-rending crash—and the canary-coloured cart, their pride and their joy, lay on its side in the ditch, an irredeemable wreck.

Water Rat, who along with Mole is accompanying Toad on the trip, is outraged. Toad, however, has a different response:

The Toad never answered a word, or budged from his seat in the road; so they went to see what was the matter with him. They found him in a sort of a trance, a happy smile on his face, his eyes still fixed on the dusty wake of their destroyer. At intervals he was still heard to murmur “Poop-poop!”

The Rat shook him by the shoulder. “Are you coming to help us, Toad?” he demanded sternly.

“Glorious, stirring sight!” murmured Toad, never offering to move. “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day—in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!”

“O stop being an ass, Toad!” cried the Mole despairingly.

“And to think I never knew!” went on the Toad in a dreamy monotone. “All those wasted years that lie behind me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now—but now that I know, now that I fully realize! O what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way! What carts I shall fling carelessly into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset! Horrid little carts—common carts—canary-colored carts!”

What Cruz—and Lindsey Graham, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elise Sefanik, J.D. Vance, Ron DeSantis, and others—have learned from Trump is motor car politics. Recklessness and destructiveness are rewarded, especially if one casually ignores or even insults the “horrid little carts” that get in one’s way. To behave like Trump is to experience the joy of trampling on others with impunity. And so, like Toad at the end of the chapter, they have left plodding horse-drawn caravans far behind:

“Heard the news?” [Rat] said. “There’s nothing else being talked about, all along the riverbank. Toad went up to Town by an early train this morning. And he has ordered a large and very expensive motorcar.”

Kenneth Grahame’s novel, written in 1908, is a nostalgic journey back into England’s pastoral past, with peace-loving animals rowing on the river, having picnics, entertaining Christmas carolers, and expelling proletariat weasels and stoats from the local squire’s manor house. The motor car, which intruded upon rural isolation, was a symbol of a way of life that was passing. Trump’s neo-fascism has upended our own political traditions so that conventional Republican politics may never be the same.

And rather than shy away in horror, many of those victimized Republicans have been sitting in Toad’s trance asking, “Where do I sign up?” Ted Cruz especially has adopted his own set of Trumpian tactics.

Further thought: For a glimpse into how exhilarating break-all-the-rules politics can be, here’s Toad in the act of hijacking a car: “Ho! ho! I am the Toad, the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes! Sit still, and you shall know what driving really is, for you are in the hands of the famous, the skilful, the entirely fearless Toad!”

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A Thieves Guild to Manage Crime

By Robin Bates | Published: April 23, 2024

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Wednesday

It may come as a surprise to those who listen to Donald Trump that America’s crime rate has been dropping dramatically in the last few years. According to new FBI statistics released last month, murders have dropped 13% since last year and violent crime is down 6%. Property crime too is down 3%. We apparently are back to pre-pandemic levels.

Crime, while never good, seems to be one of those issues like immigration—which is to say, concern about it rises and falls depending on whether or not we are in an election year. For politicians, it’s largely a matter of managing perception. Which brings me to Terry Pratchett’s Lord Vetinari.

Vetinari is the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, a parody of a great but squalid city. Though it has every ill that one associates with a city, it nevertheless works, in large part because Vetinari is a genius at managing conflict. His answer to crime is to establish a Thieves Guild.

We learn about the Thieves Guild in Guards! Guards!, the first of Pratchett’s Sam Vimes books. The series is a comic parody of hard-boiled detective novels (Vimes, Captain of the Night Watch, is a Sam Spade type), and in it we learn of Vetinari’s approach. As Pratchett explains,

One of the Patrician’s greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalizing of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organized crime.

In Pratchett’s description, the Thieves Guild works somewhat like the Federal Reserve, which is designed to protect society from inflation on the one hand and recession on the other. For its part, the Thieves Guild agrees to maintain crime at a level “to be determined annually”:

And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.

I love the phrase “chaos that is life.” And indeed, Vetinari’s policy turns out “very satisfactorily from everyone’s point of view”:

It took the head thieves a very little time to grow paunches and start having coats-of-arms made and meet in a proper building rather than smoky dens, which no one had liked much. A complicated arrangement of receipts and vouchers saw to it that, while everyone was eligible for the attentions of the Guild, no one had too much, and this was very acceptable—at least to those citizens who were rich enough to afford the quite reasonable premiums the guild charged for an uninterrupted life. There was a strange foreign word for this: inn-sewer-ants [insurance]. No one knew exactly what it had originally meant, but Ankh-Morpork had made it its own.

The system, it so happens, leads to defunding the police:

The Watch hadn’t liked it, but the plain fact was that the thieves were far better at controlling crime than the Watch had ever been. After all, the Watch had to work twice as hard to cut crime just a little, whereas all the Guild had to do was to work less.

This is not Vetinari’s only innovation. Figuring that there will always be people who want to overthrow the government, he surreptitiously sets up a number of insurrectionary groups so that they will spend all their time fighting each other. Vetinari knows that the most dangerous citizens are humorless ideologues, and he is endlessly imaginative and counterintuitive in finding ways to counteract them.

Pratchett’s comic genius, akin to Jonathan Swift’s, stems from knowing that perfection is overrated. Attempting to stamp out all society’s flaws only leads to various totalitarian systems that can’t acknowledge that we humans are basically a messy lot. That’s not to say that we should abandon our pursuit of social justice and income fairness. But we need to do so while laughing at ourselves.

In other words, be suspicious of anyone who speaks in absolutes, whether about crime or immigration or abortion or education or political correctness. France’s Republic of Virtue led to the Reign of Terror, Hitler’s pure-blooded Aryans carried out the Holocaust, and Stalin’s and Mao’s visions of a perfect communal society led to the slaughter of millions.

The best we can do is more or less manage the chaos that is our lives. And to do so while not taking ourselves too seriously.

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The House Speaker’s Théoden Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: April 22, 2024
Messick as Théoden in The Two Towers

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Monday

The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser just came up with a good Lord of the Rings analogy in describing the Speaker of the House’s about-face on aid to Ukraine. After spending half a year in thrall to what some are calling the Putin wing of the GOP, Mike Johnson had a Théoden moment and allowed the House to vote on it. It passed 311-112, albeit with more Democratic votes than Republican. (All the no votes were Republican.)

Glasser reports that Johnson’s words were “unexpectedly passionate”:

Invoking this “critical” moment in the world, Johnson said, “I can make a selfish decision”—namely, keeping his job by not moving forward on the aid for Ukraine and, once again, caving to the sort of angry nihilists who have bullied the past three Republican Speakers out of the House. “But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.” He talked about why aid for Ukraine was “critically important,” adding, “I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten.” This was yet another heresy for many Republicans, who, following Trump, have spent years tearing down the truthfulness and reliability of America’s intelligence agencies.

Susan says that the scene brought to mind that moment when the king of Rohan breaks free of Wormtongue and “suddenly returns to himself—an accommodationist no more, revivified, ready to fight.” The scene in the book begins with Gandalf functioning as one of these intelligence agencies, although probably with a more dramatic information session than the one Johnson received. Imagine Wormtongue (or Grima) as Marjorie Taylor Greene (a.k.a. “Moscow Marjorie,” as the New York Post called her):

Casting his tattered cloak aside, he stood up and leaned no longer on his staff; and he spoke in a clear cold voice. “The wise speak only of what they know, Gríma son of Gálmód. A witless worm have you become. Therefore be silent, and keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls.”

He raised his staff. There was a roll of thunder. The sunlight was blotted out from the eastern windows; the whole hall became suddenly dark as night. The fire faded to sullen embers. Only Gandalf could be seen, standing white and tall before the blackened hearth.

As with Johnson, there’s a dramatic difference between before and after. Before, Theoden is a feeble old man leaning on a stick. (In Johnson’s case, a dithering politician sucking up to the MAGA extremists.) After, there’s this:

From the king’s hand the black staff fell clattering on the stones. He drew himself up, slowly, as a man that is stiff from long bending over some dull toil. Now tall and straight he stood, and his eyes were blue as he looked into the opening sky.

“Dark have been my dreams of late,’ he said, ‘but I feel as one new-awakened.”

In Théoden’s case, Saruman has been infiltrating Rohan, with Wormtongue as his chief agent. Donald Trump, of course, has been Vladimir Putin’s chief agent, although he has had plenty of help, both from the GOP caucus (including figures like Greene and Boebert) and from grifters like Paul Manafort, now back on Trump’s campaign. Greene, like Putin, has been calling the Ukrainians Nazis, and the situation became so dire that, two weeks ago, Republican Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that Russian propaganda has seeped its way to Congress. Hill noted,

“It is absolutely true we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.

As of last week, we have a clearer sense of what Putin is up to thanks to a secret Russian Foreign Ministry document obtained by the Washington Post. The ministry is apparently calling for

an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.

“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” the document contends, adding, “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”

The parallels between Saruman’s infiltration of Rohan and Putin’s of the United States go even deeper when one looks at the historical events that influenced Tolkien’s fantasy. Saruman is partly based on Stalin, who used his non-aggression pact with Hitler (Sauron) to make inroads into Finland, the Baltic republics, and parts of Poland and Rumania. Théoden’s dithering is reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s.

Given these 1930s parallels, it’s interesting that a number of commentators have been applying a famous Winston Churchill quote to Johnson’s change of heart—that “the Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” Unfortunately, six months of Johnson trying everything has badly damaged Ukraine. As Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin notes,

The delay had serious, widespread consequences for Ukraine. Max Bergmann, a former State Department official and director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells me, “Their power sector has been decimated by lack of air defense, which will be incredibly costly to repair.” He adds that on the front “Ukrainians have lost a lot of soldiers because if you don’t have artillery you have to hold the line with men.” In other words, Ukraine has “lost a lot of people simply because we stopped providing them ammo.”

In Théoden’s case, the situation proves less dire. Although Saruman’s Orcs have made deep inroads into Rohan, with the help of the Ents he is able to defeat them at the Battle of Helm’s Deep and even capture Isengard itself. How much Ukraine can accomplish with the new American aid remains to be seen, but at least they now have a fighting chance.

I fear that Mike Johnson, on the other hand, will return to the darkness after this one bright moment. In the current GOP, sadly, Wormtongue reigns supreme.

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The World Calls to You Like Wild Geese

By Robin Bates | Published: April 21, 2024

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Monday – Earth Day

I recall the first Earth Day, which I covered for the Carleton College student newspaper in 1970. While we understood well that the earth was in trouble, we had no idea then about the damage that hydrocarbons would inflict upon weather patterns, ocean currents, glaciers, coral reefs, etc.

With environmental activism in mind, I have chosen Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” for today’s post. Activists, she tells us, don’t have to operate from some self-flagellating sense of mission, reminiscent of those desert fathers who saw extreme abstinence as a sign of virtue. Sometimes those who care about nature get so caught up in despair that they forget to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Often, in an attempt to enact earth-friendly policies, we trot out apocalyptic scenarios of an uninhabitable earth. Although the predictions are not inaccurate, it may be more persuasive to take Oliver’s approach and look up at the wild geese that are flying overhead. If we can get people to see themselves in these geese, thereby recognizing their place “in the family of things,” we’re much more likely to get them to join us in our efforts to usher in green policies.

Oliver was America’s most popular poet when she died five years ago, in part because of her passion and her appreciation for the natural world. Don’t underestimate the power of poetry to win hearts and minds when it comes to matters of the greatest urgency.

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.  

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