Simeon Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene
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Thursday
June being Pride Month, I share this wonderful Julie Marie Wade poem about an awakening. In this instance, a literal awakening foreshadows a later metaphorical awakening as the speaker gets an inkling of her true lesbian self.
Waking up in an unfamiliar house during a slumber party, Wade tells us that, back then, she “did not love women as I do now.” Or rather, she loved them “with my eyes closed, my back turned”—which is to say, without fully acknowledging that love. Her reference to “sleeping bags like straitjackets” hints at how she is herself trapped in an anatomically assigned identity. Her face “pressed into a slender pillow,” like the closed eyes, points to how close she is to a desire she dare not name. Only a slender membrane separates her from this other reality.
When I Was Straight Julie Marie Wade
I did not love women as I do now. I loved them with my eyes closed, my back turned. I loved them silent, & startled, & shy.
The world was a dreamless slumber party, sleeping bags like straitjackets spread out on the living room floor, my face pressed into a
slender pillow.
All night I woke to rain on the strangers’ windows. No one remembered to leave a light on in the hall. Someone’s father seemed always to be shaving.
When I stood up, I tried to tiptoe around the sleeping bodies, their long hair speckled with confetti, their faces blanched by the
porch-light moon.
I never knew exactly where the bathroom was. I tried to wake the host girl to ask her, but she was only one adrift in that sea of bodies. I was ashamed
to say they all looked the same to me, beautiful & untouchable as stars. It would be years before I learned to find anyone in the sumptuous,
terrifying dark.
One day she will step into that dark, touching the stars, and it will be sumptuous.
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Wednesday
While I don’t think requiring civics in grade school is the magic cure-all for our fractured society, it’s useful from time to time to remind ourselves of our foundational values. Jonathan Swift provides us with a useful summation in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels.
Given that Swift’s work is a satire—one of the world’s greatest—it’s surprising to extract anything from Gulliver’s Travels other than instances of humans acting up. There’s a point in Book II, however, where Gulliver sets forth a vision of how society’s leaders should behave.
Swift uses various satiric personae in his book to take down his targets. In Book I Gulliver is a gullible giant who takes the words of the small-minded Lilliputians at face value, in Book IV he is a crazed misanthrope who sees the worst in everybody. In Book II, however, he is a fervent patriot who sees his own country as superior to everyone else. It takes a large-minded giant to see through his boasts.
Nevertheless, his boasts give us a good sense of what we should demand of our leaders, even while making allowances that no one can achieve perfection, that we all fall short. Here’s Gulliver:
I then spoke at large upon the constitution of an English parliament; partly made up of an illustrious body called the House of Peers; persons of the noblest blood, and of the most ancient and ample patrimonies. I described that extraordinary care always taken of their education in arts and arms, to qualify them for being counsellors both to the king and kingdom; to have a share in the legislature; to be members of the highest court of judicature, whence there can be no appeal; and to be champions always ready for the defense of their prince and country, by their valor, conduct, and fidelity. That these were the ornament and bulwark of the kingdom, worthy followers of their most renowned ancestors, whose honor had been the reward of their virtue, from which their posterity were never once known to degenerate. To these were joined several holy persons, as part of that assembly, under the title of bishops, whose peculiar business is to take care of religion, and of those who instruct the people therein. These were searched and sought out through the whole nation, by the prince and his wisest counsellors, among such of the priesthood as were most deservedly distinguished by the sanctity of their lives, and the depth of their erudition; who were indeed the spiritual fathers of the clergy and the people.
That the other part of the parliament consisted of an assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the people themselves, for their great abilities and love of their country, to represent the wisdom of the whole nation. And that these two bodies made up the most august assembly in Europe; to whom, in conjunction with the prince, the whole legislature is committed.
I then descended to the courts of justice; over which the judges, those venerable sages and interpreters of the law, presided, for determining the disputed rights and properties of men, as well as for the punishment of vice and protection of innocence. I mentioned the prudent management of our treasury; the valor and achievements of our forces, by sea and land. I computed the number of our people, by reckoning how many millions there might be of each religious sect, or political party among us. I did not omit even our sports and pastimes, or any other particular which I thought might redound to the honor of my country. And I finished all with a brief historical account of affairs and events in England for about a hundred years past.
The giant king, after taking notes as he listens carefully, punctures all of Gulliver’s claims in ways that you can imagine. In fact, by the end of his interview, he concludes,
I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valor; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counselors for their wisdom….[B]y what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Gulliver will come to this same conclusion in Book IV.
But as Swift sees it, utter cynicism about human beings is no more accurate than blinkered optimism. (He counters Gulliver’s misanthropy at the end of book by giving us Pedro de Mendez, the benevolent Portuguese sea captain who goes out of his way to support Gulliver.) Why I focus on Gulliver’s paean to his country’s institutions in today’s essay is because sometimes we need reminding of what they are capable. Politicians can be broadminded and put their country first, judges can be fair, those in charge of our country’s finances can be trustworthy.
The 17th century French moralist François de la Rochefoucauld famously wrote that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. If hypocrites believe they must pretend to be virtuous, at least they acknowledge virtue to be important. I worry that Trump has taught the GOP that it’s no longer necessary to be defensively hypocritical. You say whatever you must say and do whatever you must do to gain power, with any adherence to higher values seen as a sucker’s game. In Book II, Gulliver still thinks that human beings have potential.
By Book IV, he is so disgusted with human beings that he is using human skin to fashion shoes and sails. Then he feels bad when the Houyhnhnms see him as little different from other human beings (“But I’m not like them!” he essentially protests) and drive him from their shore. Now there’s a lesson for Trump supporters who think that Trumpism will only hurt their enemies.
For those who haven’t given up, Gulliver’s description of a principled society is a lodestar that can guide our way.
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Tuesday
With Donald Trump now a convicted felon, certain parties are calling upon President Biden to pardon him. Greg Olear, a novelist and political writer who blogs at the substack Prevail, thinks this is a terrible idea and cites Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and a Czeslaw Milosz poem to explain why.
In Shakespeare’s play Portia, attempting to persuade Shylock to withdraw his “pound of flesh” agreement, delivers one of literature’s most powerful speeches on behalf of mercy. Mercy, she asserts, is a divine or holy power:
The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown: His scepter shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptered sway; It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That, in the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.
The problem with pardoning Trump, Olear points out, is that the power of pardoning is
not be used willy-nilly. Indiscriminate mercy is not mercy at all, because true mercy requires reciprocity. [Portia’s] speech begins and ends with this “both sides” idea. Mercy is a two-way street. It blesses “him that gives and him that takes.” And in praying that mercy be granted to ourselves, we learn to grant mercy to those who trespass against us.
It’s stating the obvious to say that this is not how Trump sees pardoning. Indeed, Olear say that Trump’s practice of pardoning political allies was one of the most outrageous things that he did as president. He himself
is incapable of mercy, and that makes him unworthy of mercy. There was no divinity within him when he signed off on the pardons for Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. He is a transactional creature—temporal, devoid of wisdom and refinement. He is…the man who commits a crime and should know better.
Trump has, Olear says, desecrated presidential pardoning power, draining it of its higher meaning.
Instead of being guided by lopsided demands that he pardon Trump, therefore, Olear says that Biden should be guided by Truth and Justice, two concepts celebrated in Milosz’s poem “Incantation.” The Polish poet, who helped Jews escape the Nazis during World War II and then defected from communist Poland to the West, declares that poetry and Philo-Sophia (love of wisdom) will go undefeated. Olear believes that Milosz is deliberately echoing Portia’s speech:
Incantation By Czeslaw Milosz
Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope. It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master, Giving us the estate of the world to manage. It saves austere and transparent phrases From the filthy discord of tortured words. It says that everything is new under the sun, Opens the congealed fist of the past. Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia And poetry, her ally in the service of the good. As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth, The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo. Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit. Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
So will “lie and oppression” indeed deliver themselves to destruction. If so, it won’t happen soon. Despite the fact that Trump is now a convicted felon, his supporters are more ardent than ever. In fact, they have now taken up Trump’s drumbeat that the judicial system is rigged, just as most are claiming that the 2020 election was rigged. Rationalizing away their cult leader’s behavior, they engage in “the filthy discord of tortured words,” a powerful way to describe how they contort reason and corrupt language.
If the idea of poetry and Philo-Sophia joining forces to usher in a new order seems fanciful, recall that the poet witnessed first-hand both the Holocaust and Stalinism. He saw graphic instances of bars, barbed wire, and the pulping of books. In other words, he’s no starry-eyed idealist. Perhaps, by calling his poem “incantation,” he is imagining that words of truth can bring about positive change. As Martin Luther King, echoing Jesus, put it, “I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
The power of literature to speak truth to power is a point that Indian novelist Salman Rushdie has made in an article about why we should continue to read the classics. Meanwhile Milosz sounds, in the last line, as though he’s channeling the Biblical psalms or the prophecies of Isaiah.
By observing that news of this new dispensation has been brought by “a unicorn and an echo,” Milosz acknowledges that the victory he longs for will require stepping beyond normal reality and heeding distant words. Yet he’s right that human reason Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope, that it doesn’t distinguish “Jew from Greek or slave from master.” Human reason is beautiful and invincible in the same sense that (against quoting King) the long arc of history bends toward justice. “No sentence of banishment can prevail against it,” says the man who was forced to flee Stalinist Poland.
If Portia’s mercy or Milosz’s human reason could soften Trump’s heart or open his mind, then maybe discussion of a pardon would not be out of bounds (although Biden, not being the New York governor, couldn’t usher one in the Manhattan case). But, like one of Dante’s damned souls, Trump is impervious to anything that “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” Truth and Justice are all we have to combat him with.
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Monday
Last week we saw what happens when America’s justice system works, with an impartial judge and a jury taking their responsibilities seriously. Unfortunately, not all judges are like Juan Mercham, as we’ve learned from the story of Justice Samuel Alito flying a “Stop the Steal” flag at his home during Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. We then learned that he had also been flying a Christian nationalist flag at his summer home.
I feature today a beloved poem about the opposite situation, a woman waving an American flag in the face of enemy fire to remind rebellious traitors of their patriotic duty. More on that in a moment.
Alito blamed both flag incidents on his wife—“She likes to fly flags”—but he has blown all appearance of impartiality by allowing the flags to fly at all. (Further, his story about the flags keeps changing.) That appearance is vital in the presidential immunity case currently before the Supreme Court, which has bearing on the insurrection and stolen documents cases. Alito is refusing to recuse himself from the case, as is Clarence Thomas, whose wife actively lobbied lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin (29 in Arizona, two in Wisconsin) to appoint fake electors.
In fact, there’s a chance that Alito was part of the plot by Trump supporters to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. According to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell was part of Trump’s post-election strategy
to delay certification of the Electoral College vote until Alito, who sits as Circuit Justice for Pennsylvania’s Third Circuit, could issue an injunction further delaying certification so the election could be thrown into the House of Representatives — where Trump had an advantage, as each state would get one vote to decide a contested presidential election. According to Powell, Speaker Nancy Pelosi thwarted the plot by proceeding immediately to the certification once the Capitol was secured.
Whether or not Alito was actively involved or was just regarded as a useful tool is unclear. But given how he and other rightwing members on the Court appear to be slow walking the immunity case—potentially pushing Trump’s January 6 trial to after the election (when, if elected, he would appoint an attorney general who would quash the charges)—it’s a plausible scenario.
John Greenleaf Whittier wrote “Barbara Frietchie” in 1863 at the height of the Civil War, the last time that America experienced an internal threat this serious to democracy. While Whittier doesn’t get all of his history right—he may have merged two women and two different incidents while the Confederate general involved was probably A.P. Hill rather than Stonewall Jackson—nevertheless he captures the immense significance of raising a flag. While Alito (or at least his wife) inverted their American flag to express solidarity with the January 6 insurrectionists, Frietchie waves hers right-side up in support of those fighting to preserve the union.
Alito and Thomas espouse the judicial philosophy of “originalism,” claiming to interpret the Constitution as it was originally written. Barbara Frietchie, however, proves to be the true originalist.
Barbara Frietchie By John Greenleaf Whittier
Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn,
The clustered spires of Frederick stand Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.
Round about them the orchards sweep, Apple and peach tree fruited deep,
Fair as the garden of the Lord To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,
On that pleasant morn of the early fall When Lee marched over the mountain-wall;
Over the mountains winding down, Horse and foot, into Frederick town.
Forty flags with their silver stars, Forty flags with their crimson bars,
Flapped in the morning wind: the sun Of noon looked down, and saw not one.
Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then, Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;
Bravest of all in Frederick town, She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set, To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Up the street came the rebel tread, Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.
Under his slouched hat left and right He glanced; the old flag met his sight.
“Halt!” — the dust-brown ranks stood fast. “Fire!” — out blazed the rifle-blast.
It shivered the window, pane, and sash; It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.
She leaned far out on the window-sill, And shook it forth with a royal will.
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame, Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred To life at that woman’s deed and word;
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
All day long through Frederick street Sounded the tread of marching feet:
All day long that free flag tost Over the heads of the rebel host.
Ever its torn folds rose and fell On the loyal winds that loved it well;
And through the hill-gaps sunset light Shone over it with a warm good-night.
Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er, And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.
Honor to her! and let a tear Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.
Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave, Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!
Peace and order and beauty draw Round thy symbol of light and law;
And ever the stars above look down On thy stars below in Frederick town!
We not seeing much of a “shade of sadness, a blush of shame” from those Republicans who are voicing support for Trump’s assaults on elections and the court system–which makes insisting on “peace and order” and “light and law” more important than ever. May the true flag of Freedom and Union, not flags of division and Christo-nationalism, forever wave!
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Sunday
This past Friday, May 31, was the Feast of the Visitation. This is moment when, two months after becoming pregnant with Jesus, Mary visited her maternal aunt Elizabeth, soon to be mother of John the Baptist. Given the society’s strictures against unwed mothers, one can imagine Mary’s anxieties and how grateful she must have been for Elizabeth’s positive encouragement. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!” Elizabeth told her (according to Luke). And a little later, “As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!”
In “A Blessing Called Sanctuary,” writer and ordained Methodist minister Jan Richardson imagines Elizabeth recalling Mary’s visit. “You hardly knew,” she tells her niece,
how hungry you were to be gathered in, to receive the welcome that invited you to enter entirely— nothing of you found foreign or strange…
In Richardson’s telling, the house becomes a sanctuary—Mary stayed three months before returning to Galilee to marry Joseph—and Elizabeth remembers how Mary settled in, “leaning into the blessing that enfolded you.” At this point in the poem, this blessing is both Elizabeth’s blessing and the pregnancy itself. As Mary leans into both—they are described as “unimagined grace”—she is able
to breathe again, to move without fear, to speak with abandon the words you carried in your bones, that echoed in your being.
You learned to sing.
The song she sings is “The Magnificat,” also known as “The Song of Mary.” The blessing Mary has received, Elizabeth tells her, cannot stay private. “The deal with this blessing,” the aunt asserts,
is that it will not leave you alone, will not let you linger in safety, in stasis.
In other words, Mary cannot continue to hunker down in Elizabeth’s house. Just as that house and the pregnancy have become sanctuaries, so Mary’s words must go public becoming a sanctuary for the world. As Elizabeth puts it, Mary will need
to speak your word into the world, to tell what you have heard with your own ears, seen with your own eyes, known in your own heart…
What Mary has heard, seen, and known during the time spent with her aunt is that she is blessed among women. That message, which is true of all of us, is summed in Elizabeth’s closing words:
[Y]ou are beloved, precious child of God, beautiful to behold, and you are welcome here.
I love how, with the final “you are welcome here,” the poem folds back around to Elizabeth’s welcoming hospitality. When we, like a newly pregnant and frightened Mary, are moving through a hostile and uncomprehending world, unsure of ourselves and not knowing where to turn, God opens Her arms to us.
Here’s Richardson’s poem:
A Blessing Called Sanctuary By Jan Richardson
You hardly knew how hungry you were to be gathered in, to receive the welcome that invited you to enter entirely— nothing of you found foreign or strange, nothing of your life that you were asked to leave behind or to carry in silence or in shame.
Tentative steps became settling in, leaning into the blessing that enfolded you, taking your place in the circle that stunned you with its unimagined grace.
You began to breathe again, to move without fear, to speak with abandon the words you carried in your bones, that echoed in your being.
You learned to sing.
But the deal with this blessing is that it will not leave you alone, will not let you linger in safety, in stasis.
The time will come when this blessing will ask you to leave, not because it has tired of you but because it desires for you to become the sanctuary that you have found– to speak your word into the world, to tell what you have heard with your own ears, seen with your own eyes, known in your own heart:
that you are beloved, precious child of God, beautiful to behold, and you are welcome and more than welcome here.
And in case you need reminding, here’s Mary’s “Magnificat,” which assures us all that we are indeed precious children of God:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel for he has remembered his promise of mercy, the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever.
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Friday
I’m still trying to process the “guilty on all counts” verdict brought against Donald Trump yesterday. Above all, I’m impressed with how the American justice system rose to the occasion, in spite of the unprecedented attempts by Trump and Trump sycophants to tear it down. The judge brought a sense of gravitas and dignity to the proceedings, and the jury took their job seriously. Instead of a circus we saw the rule of law.
As I try to imagine Donald Trump responding to the verdict the moment it was delivered, I think of Fagin at the end of Oliver Twist. Of course, there’s much more at stake in Fagin’s case: if he is found guilty of running a gang and fencing stolen goods, he will be hung. Nevertheless, Trump may well have experienced some of the same excruciating waiting. Here’s Dickens’s account of Fagin in court:
The court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces. Inquisitive and eager eyes peered from every inch of space. From the rail before the dock, away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the galleries, all looks were fixed upon one man—Fagin. Before him and behind: above, below, on the right and on the left: he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.
He stood there, in all this glare of living light, with one hand resting on the wooden slab before him, the other held to his ear, and his head thrust forward to enable him to catch with greater distinctness every word that fell from the presiding judge, who was delivering his charge to the jury. At times, he turned his eyes sharply upon them to observe the effect of the slightest featherweight in his favor; and when the points against him were stated with terrible distinctness, looked towards his counsel, in mute appeal that he would, even then, urge something in his behalf. Beyond these manifestations of anxiety, he stirred not hand or foot. He had scarcely moved since the trial began; and now that the judge ceased to speak, he still remained in the same strained attitude of close attention, with his gaze bent on him, as though he listened still.
A slight bustle in the court, recalled him to himself. Looking round, he saw that the jurymen had turned together, to consider their verdict. As his eyes wandered to the gallery, he could see the people rising above each other to see his face: some hastily applying their glasses to their eyes: and others whispering their neighbors with looks expressive of abhorrence. A few there were, who seemed unmindful of him, and looked only to the jury, in impatient wonder how they could delay. But in no one face—not even among the women, of whom there were many there—could he read the faintest sympathy with himself, or any feeling but one of all-absorbing interest that he should be condemned.
As he saw all this in one bewildered glance, the deathlike stillness came again, and looking back he saw that the jurymen had turned towards the judge. Hush!
They only sought permission to retire.
He looked, wistfully, into their faces, one by one when they passed out, as though to see which way the greater number leant; but that was fruitless. The jailer touched him on the shoulder. He followed mechanically to the end of the dock, and sat down on a chair. The man pointed it out, or he would not have seen it.
He looked up into the gallery again. Some of the people were eating, and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs; for the crowded place was very hot. There was one young man sketching his face in a little notebook. He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the artist broke his pencil-point, and made another with his knife, as any idle spectator might have done.
In the same way, when he turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress, and what it cost, and how he put it on. There was an old fat gentleman on the bench, too, who had gone out, some half an hour before, and now come back. He wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner, what he had had, and where he had had it; and pursued this train of careless thought until some new object caught his eye and roused another.
Not that, all this time, his mind was, for an instant, free from one oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could not fix his thoughts upon it. Thus, even while he trembled, and turned burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken off, and whether they would mend it, or leave it as it was. Then, he thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold—and stopped to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it—and then went on to think again.
At length there was a cry of silence, and a breathless look from all towards the door. The jury returned, and passed him close. He could glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone. Perfect stillness ensued—not a rustle—not a breath—Guilty.
For all Trump’s bravado, which often took the form of attacks against the judge, the judge’s daughter, the district attorney, various witnesses, jury members, Joe Biden, and others, he was unusually subdued when he emerged from the courtroom at trial’s end. Perhaps, like Fagin, he was overwhelmed by being finally held to account. The very solidity of Judge Merchan’s courtroom signaled to him that here at least was one reality he couldn’t ignore, gaslight, or talk his way out of.
And so it was that, for the first time in American history, we saw a former president awaiting a verdict in a felony trial. “Perfect stillness ensued—not a rustle—not a breath—Guilty.”
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Thursday
I write this post as the jury in Donald Trump’s business fraud/election interference trial is in recess, to resume deliberations tomorrow. Like so many, I am wondering whether the former president will, for once in his life, be held criminally accountable for his behavior. In the past I’ve compared him to John Gay’s Mac the Knife, a romantic rogue who miraculously escapes punishment whenever the authorities attempt to bring him to justice. Will we see yet another miraculous escape here?
Speaking of rogues, Trump has attempted to play the rogue card and even to surround himself with rogues. Recently, while angling for Libertarian votes at the nominating convention, he promised to pardon Ross Ulbricht, a Libertarian hero who was sentenced to a life in prison for operating an online marketplace where illegal drugs were bought and sold. (Ulbricht tried to have five people killed while six deaths resulted from drugs bought on his website.) In the past, Trump has lionized and pardoned Eddie Gallagher, the Navy Seal who was indicted for war crimes and who, in the words of fellow Iraq war veterans, was “okay will killing anything that moved.” Of course, Trump is also promising to pardon the rogues who stormed the Capitol on January 6, and last week he invited two rappers charged with murder to join him on stage at a Bronx rally. As Trump sees it, being a rogue gives him a leg up with the Black community: he has been telling African Americans that he’s just like them because of his run-ins with the law.
Trump, it must be said, is much less engaging than Mac the Knife, who while dodgy is also open-hearted and magnanimous.
In the Manhattan case I’ve seen hints of the trial in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Knave of Hearts has been accused of stealing a tray of tarts, as reported in the Mother Goose rhyme:
The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer day: The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And took them quite away!”
The evidence, as in Trump’s case, is circumstantial. As with Trump, there’s written documentation, and as with Trump—who is famous for never leaving a paper trail himself–the Knave points out the absence of his signature: “I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”
In the end, however, there’s no question that the knave stole the tarts—they are returned after the king “beat the knave full sore” (according to the nursery rhyme) or “returned from him to you” (according to a letter obtained by the White Rabbit). And we see the tarts themselves, just as we are seeing checks signed by Trump and reimbursement notes signed by his Chief Financial Officer.
Putting aside the details of the trial, however, I find myself wondering if, finally, justice will be served to a man who has spent his whole life thumbing his nose at the rule of law. Every time he has been caught red-handed (inviting Russian election interference, pressuring election officials, goading his followers to attack the Capitol, stealing government documents), he has been able—like Mac—to evade or postpone judgment. I thus find myself like the perpetually frustrated speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “I many times thought peace had come.” Substitute “accountability” for “peace” and you’ll see my state of mind:
I many times thought peace had come, When peace was far away; As wrecked men deem they sight the land At center of the sea,
And struggle slacker, but to prove, As hopelessly as I, How many the fictitious shores Before the harbor lie.
Is the shore close at hand or will it prove once against fictitious? We’ll know soon.
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Wednesday
My dear friend Rebecca Adams sent me a fascinating article on Gen Z members who are pushing back against “phone-based childhood.” In “The Youth Rebellion is Growing,” Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt profile seven leaders who are actively working to reduce the serious harms associated with cellphones.
One of these leaders, Ben Spagloss, could be a poster child for better living through literature. Thanks to a mentor he met in high school, Spagloss went from non-reader to voracious reader. Now, as an adult, he uses TikTok to persuade people to get off their phones. He also wants us all to pressure Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, which tech companies are fighting with a $60 million a year lobbying effort.
As Spagloss describes his outreach to his 190,000 followers,
I will try to get people interested in books, or post at night to help people to power off and sleep. I will also try to teach different behavioral change skills to help people navigate some of the internal barriers that can make change so hard.”
It’s ironic that Spagloss uses his phone to persuade others to abandon theirs, but how else would he do it? As he puts it, “My generation’s world is online, so I thought I’d try to reach people there.”
Spagloss reports that books received no respect in his high school, where
“reading a book” was a joke. The laugh-out-loud kind of funny. The reality was SparkNotes, CliffNotes, your friend’s notes, or whatever you found online to get the assignment done. The real school we went to every day was the Internet. The social media platforms had a perfect attendance rate, but what they were giving to the kids, nobody knew at the time.
What changed him was an after-school tutor who became a father figure. The man saw through Spagloss’s tough and uncaring act, teaching him “that loving others and aspiring to change the world was a much better philosophy.”
Imitating his mentor, Spagloss turned to books, reading 50 his first year and “a couple hundred” the year after. Reading changed the way he saw his phone.
It was in part this new perspective that drew him to dystopian or speculative fiction. While bookish adolescents are generally attracted to this genre—after all, they’re beginning to think beyond their family and peer units to explore the broader world—Spagloss was most fascinated by a work that is sometimes overshadowed by 1984, The Road, The Stand, Handmaid’s Tale, The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Parable of the Sower, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games, and the Oryx and Crake trilogy. Looking at his concerns, however, one can see why Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World would strike a chord.
As Spagloss points out, in Huxley’s work “the typical antagonist of the tyrannical government isn’t present. Instead, the protagonist is the antagonist. The people oppress themselves.” Because the authorities encourage consumerism and endless entertainment and freely allow both sex and drug use, the citizenry doesn’t aspire to anything more. As Bernard Marx, a discontented character, observes, people used to read and think, whereas now
the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labor and distraction, scampering from feely [movie] to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to…”
Spagloss sees Brave New World as even more relevant now than it was in the early 1930s, when it first appeared. He observes,
It pointed to a world where the books don’t burn, but the libraries are left unchecked. Where information is not deprived from people, but given in incomprehensible abundance. Where the culture is not controlled but instead trivial, comedic, sexual, or roasted. In this world, people are not controlled by inflicting pain, but pleasure. It was a world without pain, poetry, truth, or meaning. I saw pleasure, when Huxley and later [Neil] Postman, pointed from their graves to my phone with their stories.
American culture critic Postman, whose 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, saw Brave New World rather than 1984 as our future in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I wonder what he’d say now, what with the rise of Donald Trump in this country and of authoritarian regimes around the world. Orwell seems only too relevant, especially the dictum, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
As I think about this further, however, one can combine both dystopias: what we are currently experiencing is a reality television host performing Big Brother wannabe for the entertainment of his fans. Trump has become the drug of choice for a swath of the American public, some of whom saw invading the U.S. Capitol as freedom fighter cosplay. (Meanwhile some of Trump’s enablers in Congress have described them as “tourists” and “hostages.”)
In Brave New World, meanwhile, John the Savage, seeking to escape a world in which constant drugs and entertainment numb the senses, engages in self-flagellation with a ceremonial whip—but that just becomes a new form of entertainment for the jaded multitudes. What are the feelies and soma to spectator sadism?
“The whip,” answered a hundred voices confusedly. “Do the whipping stunt. Let’s see the whipping stunt.”
Then, in unison and on a slow, heavy rhythm, “We-want-the whip,” shouted a group at the end of the line. “We-want-the whip.”
Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was repeated, parrot- fashion, again and again, with an ever-growing volume of sound, until, by the seventh or eighth reiteration, no other word was being spoken. “We-want- the whip.”
They were all crying together; and, intoxicated by the noise, the unanimity, the sense of rhythmical atonement, they might, it seemed, have gone on for hours almost indefinitely.
When Lenina, a sexually charged woman who has been trying to seduce John, rushes out to him, he turns the whip first on her and then back on himself. The crowd has gotten what they came for:
With a whoop of delighted excitement the line broke; there was a convergent stampede towards that magnetic center of attraction. Pain was a fascinating horror.
Their subsequent behavior is akin to all those MAGA bullies who, inspired by Trump, confront people in supermarkets, shopping malls, parks, and other venues. It’s as though they have been given permission to lash out, and they turn on each other and on Lenina, who is on the ground:
Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the heather at his feet.
I can’t help but see the storming of the Capitol in the scene.
Tom Nichols, a former Republican who writes for the Atlantic, has been calling America “an unserious country” for close to a decade now, seeing us “in the grip both of trivial silliness and dead-serious psychosis.” When people are more interested in being entertained than in governing, we have a Huxley society. Unfortunately, Huxley is only a step away from Orwell since there are authoritarians-in-waiting who are more than eager, with a Trump victory, to install a Christo-fascist state. And if that happens, the reality television show that is American politics will turn deadly serious. Actual pain will ensue.
Can literature stop this? Well, if it alerts Gen Z leaders like Ben Spagloss to these dangers—and if he can persuade his fellows to put down their phones and pay attention to what’s happening—then at least there will be pushback.
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Tuesday
I never cease to marvel at how small scenes from a novel read in childhood—scenes that others might overlook—are woven into our understanding of the world. When the scene intersects with something we encounter in real life, we have a powerful framework for processing this new information.
Today I’m thinking of my first encounter with real hunger. Having been raised in a middle-class household, I have never experienced deprivation. But Sewanee is located in the Southern Appalachians, where Hunger exists—or at least it did so in my childhood. Two incidents come to mind.
Before recounting them, however, I share a passage from Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), which primed me for what I was to witness. The novel, I hasten to mention, is nothing like the Disney movie. For one thing, early in the book Pinocchio throws a hammer at the talking cricket that functions as his conscience, killing it (“With a last weak “cri-cri-cri” the poor Cricket fell from the wall, dead!”). After that, the mischievous marionette can receive guidance only from the cricket’s ghost. Pinocchio is unexpectedly grim for a children’s book—at one point Pinocchio barely survives after the Fox and the Cat hang him by the neck from a tree—and part of the grimness involves starvation.
In the scene I remember, Pinocchio has been frantic with hunger until Geppetto returns home with three pears, at which point he gets picky. What transpires is a lesson in not wasting food:
“If you want me to eat them, please peel them for me.”
“Peel them?” asked Geppetto, very much surprised. “I should never have thought, dear boy of mine, that you were so dainty and fussy about your food. Bad, very bad! In this world, even as children, we must accustom ourselves to eat of everything, for we never know what life may hold in store for us!”
“You may be right,” answered Pinocchio, “but I will not eat the pears if they are not peeled. I don’t like them.”
And good old Geppetto took out a knife, peeled the three pears, and put the skins in a row on the table.
Pinocchio ate one pear in a twinkling and started to throw the core away, but Geppetto held his arm.
“Oh, no, don’t throw it away! Everything in this world may be of some use!”
“But the core I will not eat!” cried Pinocchio in an angry tone.
“Who knows?” repeated Geppetto calmly.
And later the three cores were placed on the table next to the skins.
Pinocchio had eaten the three pears, or rather devoured them. Then he yawned deeply, and wailed:
“I’m still hungry.”
“But I have no more to give you.”
“Really, nothing—nothing?”
“I have only these three cores and these skins.”
“Very well, then,” said Pinocchio, “if there is nothing else I’ll eat them.”
At first he made a wry face, but, one after another, the skins and the cores disappeared.
“Ah! Now I feel fine!” he said after eating the last one.
And then this very didactic book delivers its message:
“You see,” observed Geppetto, “that I was right when I told you that one must not be too fussy and too dainty about food. My dear, we never know what life may have in store for us!”
Now for my childhood stories. Appalachian poverty runs deep, and in some of the communities around Sewanee were people living in tarpaper shacks. There were no free-lunch or free-breakfast programs in those days, and I remember a couple of boys in seventh grade leaving morning classes early in order to sweep out the dining hall in exchange for lunch money.
At one point in fifth grade we had an Easter egg hunt, with the prize being a large popcorn rabbit held together by some sweet, sticky substance, maybe caramel.
I took the hunt very seriously and am pretty sure I found the most eggs. But classmate Curtis (not his real name) claimed that he had found the most and, without counting what was in our bags, the teacher presented him with the rabbit. I remember feeling cheated and aggrieved.
Or I felt that way until I saw what happened next. Curtis grabbed the rabbit and bit into it with ferocity such as I had never seen before, devouring it to the last kernel. There was no dainty nibbling around the edges. I knew—in part from having reading Pinocchio and in part by the intensity of the moment—that I was in the presence of Hunger. At that moment, I was glad that, whether fairly or not, Curtis had won that rabbit. My own desires and needs were secondary.
This experience was reenforced a couple of years later in seventh grade. We had some kind of bread or rice pudding for lunch one day, into which the chef had much so much sugar or something that it was too rich too eat. Kids will eat almost anything sweet, but in this case no one could get it down. We all left it on our plates.
Well, almost all of us. I remember seeing Curtis, back behind the lunch counter, shoveling down the food from the large bowl out of which it had been served. He was using one of the large serving spoons and appeared to be (as the expression went) “in hog heaven.” Once again, I recognized I was in the presence of Hunger.
I’m not sure I would have connected the dots had I not read Pinocchio. The story had lodged in my head because of my strong initial response—I had been torn between feeling sorry for the marionette and ashamed at his antics—and now a life incident was prompting me to recall it.
All of which is to say that, whether at home or at school, children must be introduced to a constant stream of books. Adults cannot always predict what they will take away with them.
