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Wednesday
I recently invoked Brecht in a post about how the Supreme Court’s rightwing members are green lighting racial profiling, but I could just as well have cited Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. That’s because, even as it gives ICE the freedom to “seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job” (to quote from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s stinging dissent), it also has stripped them of legal recourse if they are so seized.
Here’s Yossarian encountering Catch-22:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
A writer for The Ink lays out the situation. First there is what has become known as “the Kavanaugh Stop” given that justice’s defense of racial profiling:
[A]s for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.
We’re seeing increasing instances where this is not in fact the case—the Ink article observes that, “from the beginning of Stephen Miller’s mass deportation effort, U.S. citizens and noncitizen residents have been repeatedly ensnared in raids”—but for to these victims Kavanaugh offers further reassurance:
To the extent that excessive force has been used, the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies should be available in federal court.
Here, however, the Supreme Court’s Catch-22 clicks into effect. Citing Damon Root at Reason, the article observes that “Kavanaugh here is forgetting about — or ignoring — his own earlier ruling that made it more or less impossible for somebody abused by federal agents to get such remedies.” Thanks to the Court’s 2022 majority opinion in Egbert v. Boule, it is “practically impossible to sue a federal officer over an alleged constitutional rights violation.”
In other words, Kavanaugh is contending that, while the Constitution protects people from excessive force, they can’t do anything against someone who uses excessive force.
[Respectful whistle]
Further thought: I’m trying to figure out if the following SCOTUS rulings are a Catch-22: law enforcement officers are allowed to take race into account when they arrest people, but colleges are not allowed to take race into account in the admissions process. Color blind for thee but not for me.
Perhaps this isn’t an instance of Catch-22, which is a hellish circle, but rather a garden-level double standard. Same result, however.
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Tuesday
Yesterday, with Banned Books Week in mind, I surmised that rightwing book censors have been going after Stephen King’s novels because he voices dark truths about America that they would prefer to keep hidden. I can say the same about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which schools all around the country have been removing from libraries. Like King, Morrison delves into America’s long history of violence and the scars it has left on our collective psyche.
There’s a positive note here as well, however. Both authors believe that, in acknowledging and facing up to that history, we can begin to move past it. Unlike MAGA, they believe the only way past is through. Closing one’s eyes, on the other hand, just compounds the problem.
I taught both IT and Beloved in fantasy classes at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I taught King in my American Fantasy class, in which I identified a light strain and a dark strain of fantasy running through American literature. (There’s also a fantasy tradition in Native American literature, but that’s in a class by itself.) The light strain, originating in John Winthrop’s analogy of “American as a city on the hill,” would go on to include L. Frank Baum (who in The Wizard of Oz set out write a fairy tale without shadows) and Walt Disney. The dark strain, which could also be called the gothic strain, includes Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and King. At the core of gothic horror is Freud’s theory of the uncanny or spooky, where we repress our fears, only to see them return as monsters. (Freud called this “the return of the repressed”—or as the sci-film film Forbidden Planet put it, “monsters from the id.”) As I noted yesterday, King dreams America’s nightmares.
Beloved, meanwhile, I once taught in a Magical Realism course, along with Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. In both courses I pointed out that fantasy, as Rushdie has noted, gives authors a special freedom in exploring volatile issues.
In IT, a group of children must battle with America’s dark id (personified by Pennywise the clown) and then, when they have forgotten all about the struggle, must battle with it again as adults. The one member of “the Losers Club” who does not forget is librarian Mike Hanlon, who acts as King’s avatar, finding connections between periodic explosions of violence. (Everyone else lives in blissful ignorance.) Hanlon calls the group back together when he realizes that Pennywise is preparing to attack again.
Hanlon is African American, the only person of color in the group, and I believe that King has made this choice because he sees African Americans as being particularly attuned to America’s long history of violence. Blacks remember when whites forget, in large part because the racism remains. Morrison’s Nobel-winning masterpiece bears this out.
I noted a week ago, in a post about Beloved and the famous “Scourged Back” photo from the Civil War, why right wingers have attacked Beloved. White supremacists don’t want Americans to be reading about the horrors of slavery, which could be so intense that they would drive a mother to kill her daughter. What they don’t realize is that King and Morrison both offer them a way out of the anger that is contorting their lives.
In battling with IT, the former child companions are not without resources as they face their fears. As children, they forged friendships across race, gender, class, and neurodiversity lines, forming a kind of mini American republic. In the end, they are saved by this companionship, along with their willingness and courage to grapple with their individual demons.
Morrison’s vision is more complex, but a major concern is the scars borne by African Americans over the trauma of slavery and of racism generally. Sethe is haunted by the child she killed, her lover Paul D is haunted by his own history as a slave, and Sethe’s living daughter Denver finds herself trapped in her mother’s guilt and sorrow. The haunting takes the form of the dead child returning as a ghost (Beloved) and holding them all in thrall.
By returning, however, Beloved also gives the characters the chance to revisit the trauma each has buried, and this proves to be the first step to moving past it. Through a community exorcism; through individual courage on the part of Denver (she first mothers her mother and then breaks from the family to live her own life); and through the love of Paul D for Sethe—he tells her that she herself is worthy of love and there’s a chance that she will believe him—the novel ends on a brighter note. We don’t have to remain forever stuck in the past.
Those who want to erase America’s long history of barbarism rather than facing it will remain stuck in a constant state of regression. It’s an empty way to live the precious life you have been given.
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Monday
Harold Bloom once wrote that Edgar Allan Poe dreamed America’s nightmares, and what Poe did for the 19th century Stephen King has done for the second half of the 20th. Practitioners of the horror genre articulate dark truths that cultures wish to avoid, which is why their works simultaneously fascinate and repel audiences—which is why King is both the bestselling author of the past 50 years and also (at least in America) the most banned.
I choose to highlight King and book banning today, partly because Banned Books Week began yesterday and partly because I think that the political horrors that Americans witnessed this past week help us understand why King is so targeted. The horrors I have in mind are the invasions of Chicago and Portland by armed troops, the extrajudicial killings of Venezuelan boat crews, and Trump speaking of “the enemy within” to military generals and vilifying Democrats in a speech to Norfolk Navy folk. Hang on while I explain the connection with King.
First to some general facts about book banning. PEN America, the writers organization, has just reported on the latest figures:
Between July 2024 and June 2025, the fourth school year of the book ban crisis nationwide, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts. For the third straight year, Florida was the No. 1 state for book bans, with 2,304 instances of bans, followed by Texaswith 1,781 bans and Tennessee with 1,622. Together, PEN America reports nearly 23,000 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since 2021.
Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, has declared, “Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country.”
King leads the list, with 87 of his works affected. Florida alone has banned 23 of his books, leading the always blunt author to tweet, “What the f***!” and later, “May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book banners don’t always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit.”
King’s advice to young people, when they see their school libraries banning books, has long been, “Run to your public library, or the nearest bookstore, and read what it is your elders don’t want you to know.”
Seeking to understand why King leads the list, reviewer and crime novelist Michael J. Seidlinger believes that the author makes a point of “facing the uncomfortable side of society and humanity.” Rather than turn away from what we fear, he delves into the fear itself.
MAGA, like all authoritarian movements, is driven by fear: fear of change, fear of appearing weak, fear of women and minorities, fear of modernity generally. Demagogues like Trump play to these fears and can incite the fearful to acts of unimaginable violence. In IT, the King novel I know best, we see murderous violence unleashed against many groups that MAGA demonizes, including gay men, assertive wives, African Americans, racially mixed couples, the environment, and children.
I include children in my list because of ICE’s treatment of kids, not only in ripping them from parents but, in the Chicago raid, using zip ties. As political commentator Jay Quo describes it, agents from ICE, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), and the FBI
swarmed a residential building in Chicago, even dropping in from Black Hawk helicopters like some sort of special commandos going after dangerous terrorists. They indiscriminately broke into people’s apartments and yanked them from their beds. Some residents were naked. They ransacked apartments and even zip tied small children. Some U.S. citizens were detained for hours.
One neighbor, Eboni Watson, said that residents had to duck for cover as they heard flash bangs and then described what he witnessed:
They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,. That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, “f*** them kids.”
IT refers to the id, which is a derivation of the German word for “it” (“es”). Freud used it to designate our primal urges, which if not checked lead to barbarism. Throughout the novel, the homicidal clown Pennywise stands in for the id, and he not only commits horrors himself but incites mobs to do so. In one historical account, a town’s citizens take the law into their own hands and unleash hell on a group of bank robbers and their mistresses. As one witness remembers the incident,
It was all over in four, maybe five minutes, but it seemed a whole hell of a lot longer while it was happening. Petie and Al and Jimmy Gordon just sat there on the courthouse steps and poured bullets into the back end of the Chevrolet. I saw Bob Tanner down on one knee, firing and working the bold on that old rifle of his like a madman. Jagermeyer and Salle from under the theater marquee and Greg Cole stood in the gutter, hold that .45 automatic out in both hands, pulling the trigger just as fast as he could work it….There must have been fifty, sixty men firing all at once….When it was at its worst, it sounded like the Battle of the Marne. Windows were blown in by rifle-fire all around Machen’s.
Trump and his supporters fantasize about such bloodletting. He recently posted that, if Hamas doesn’t agree to his peace plan, they will experience “all HELL, like no one has ever seen before.” And while Vice President Vance jeers at the boats that have been blown up off the coast of Venezuela—“I wouldn’t go fishing right now”—Trump advisor Stephen Miller takes great pleasure in promising to “unleash” the police on inner city Memphis:
The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless. They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think that they’re tough. They have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore. We are so much more hardcore than they are, and we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us.”
We saw America’s id unleashed against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and, in addition to ICE brutality, we are seeing increasing instances of Americans throwing off prior restraint as they let their anger spill over. Between unaccountable law enforcement officials and easy access to guns, America is seeing civil society under assault in ways that remind southerners of the days when the KKK ran unchecked.
Stephen King shows us this ugly side of ourselves. No wonder his books get banned.
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Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading is the mustard seed parable as it appears in Luke. All three of the synoptic gospels have the story, and since Denise Levertov refers to them all in the poem below, I share the Luke and Mark versions for background. (The Matthew is almost identical to Mark’s):
First, Luke (17:5-6):
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
Now Mark (4:30-34):
And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
Mark then makes a distinction between poetry and expository prose (or right brain and left brain thinking):
With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.
After acknowledging that most of her readers will never have seen a mustard tree, she says that’s okay because we should focus on the small seed, not the big tree. She imagines the parable originating from Jesus walking through a wheat field, gleaning “intimate milky kernels, good/ to break on the tongue.” Then he downsizes his metaphor, moving from wheat kernel to mustard seed.
We get so hung up on how big the tree becomes—or on how faith is supposed to move mountains or feed multitudes—that we miss the paradox, the dramatic difference in size. The point is not that our faith is supposed to grow to become as big as a tree but that it initially appears to be as small and worthless as a speck of dust. It’s amazing that anything at all will come of it.
Stay small, she essentially counsels us. If we start from this humble premise, then we can appreciate the real miracle, which is how, from a tiny speck, our lives will begin to bloom. We ourselves will become a blossoming tree, providing a home for our soul. And not only for our own soul but for “a great concourse of birds/ at home there, wings among yellow flowers.”
What is the kingdom of God? It is this flowering self, what Yeats in “Among School Children” calls a “great rooted blossomer” swaying to music. The “kingdom of faith” awaits us, and although we have doubts—how could we not given how small and fragile our faith seems?—our task is to plant the seed.
On the Parables of the Mustard Seed By Denise Levertov
Who ever saw the mustard-plant, wayside weed or tended crop, grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful of shade and nests and songs? Acres of yellow, not a bird of the air in sight.
No, He who knew the west wind brings the rain, the south wind thunder, who walked the field-paths running His hand along wheatstems to glean those intimate milky kernels, good to break on the tongue,
was talking of miracle, the seed within us, so small we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust, nothing. Glib generations mistake the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees, not noticing paradox. Mountains remain unmoved.
Faith is rare, He must have been saying, prodigious, unique — one infinitesimal grain divided like loaves and fishes,
as if from a mustard-seed a great shade-tree grew. That rare, that strange: the kingdom
a tree. The soul a bird. A great concourse of birds at home there, wings among yellow flowers. The waiting kingdom of faith, the seed waiting to be sown.
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Friday
Primatologist Jane Goodall, who opened our eyes to the complexity of chimpanzees and so much more, died Wednesday at 91. As National Public Radio summed up her life,
While living among chimpanzees in Africa decades ago, Goodall documented the animals using tools and doing other activities previously believed to be exclusive to people, and also noted their distinct personalities. Her observations and subsequent magazine and documentary appearances in the 1960s transformed how the world perceived not only humans’ closest living biological relatives but also the emotional and social complexity of all animals, while propelling her into the public consciousness.
And then there’s this Goodall observation, made four years ago:
Out there in nature by myself, when you’re alone, you can become part of nature and your humanity doesn’t get in the way. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience when suddenly you hear different sounds and you smell different smells and you’re actually part of this amazing tapestry of life.
Goodall takes up this theme in “The Old Wisdom,” written (I believe) in 2014. One can’t read her advice to “go out and seek your soul” without thinking how she herself went out into the wilds of Tanzania—the Gombe Stream National Park—to study chimpanzee communities. In doing so, discovered “the Eternal I.”
The Old Wisdom By Jane Goodall
When the night wind makes the pine trees creak And the pale clouds glide across the dark sky, Go out my child, go out and seek Your soul: The Eternal I.
For all the grasses rustling at your feet And every flaming star that glitters high Above you, close up and meet In you: The Eternal I.
Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow And silent, comprehending all, and by and by Your soul, the Universe, will know Itself: the Eternal I.
I like how one has to read line three of the second stanza twice, first as a continuation of the second line but then in conjunction with what follows in the third. The star glitters “high above you” but then “above you” can be joined to the contrasting “close up,” so that the two “meet in you.” This joining of the vast and the small, flaming star and “grasses rustling at your feet,” reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:
To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.
I am also put in mind of the final lines of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Each and All”:
As I spoke, beneath my feet The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath, Running over the club-moss burrs; I inhaled the violet’s breath; Around me stood the oaks and firs; Pinecones and acorns lay on the ground; Over me soared the eternal sky, Full of light and of deity; Again I saw, again I heard, The rolling river, the morning bird; — Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
Goodall yielded herself to the perfect whole and, in the process, discovered the Eternal I, both in herself and in all of us.
Escaped slave Gordon (a.k.a. Peter). Photo taken in 1863
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Monday
Few photos from the Civil War era are more iconic than “The Scourged Back,” where scars from a vicious beating can be seen on a runaway slave. Therefore, the image’s recent removal from certain venues is creating a furor amongst historians and archivists. As CNN reports,
On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that officials at an unidentified national park had ordered that the photo be taken down, along with other signs and exhibits related to slavery. Citing unnamed sources, the newspaper described the move as being in line with an executive order Trump issued in March directing the US Interior Department to do away with content that disparages “Americans past or living.”
In today’s post I will be writing about another work of art featuring a scourged back, one that has also faced censorship as a result. More on Toni Morrison’s Beloved in a moment.
Apparently the removal of “Scourged Back” is controversial enough that the department that runs the National Park Service is now denying the report, although its weasel words do not inspire confidence: “If any interpretive materials are found to have been removed or altered prematurely or in error, the Department will review the circumstances and take corrective action as appropriate.”
There’s no doubt about what Trump himself wants. He has complained that the Smithsonian focuses “too much on how bad slavery was,” and no photo dramatizes more how bad slavery was than “Scourged Back,” which activists in 1863 used to rally support for the abolition of slavery. Abraham Lincoln needed such support to back up his signing of “The Emancipation Proclamation” earlier in the year.
Morrison’s graphic depiction of her protagonist’s sexual assault and subsequent whipping helps explain why Beloved is one of the most banned novels in America. The still bloody scarring is described to Sethe by a poor white woman who helps her to shelter after she has run away and who refers to her as “Lu”:
It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this.
The beating occurs after Sethe, who is late in a pregnancy, informs her mistress that she has been assaulted by the master’s sons and had her milk sucked from her breasts. As she later tells Paul D, one of her fellow slaves who reconnects with her after the war, her master (“Schoolteacher”) makes her pay:
“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on them. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.” “They used cowhide on you?” “And they took my milk.” They beat you and you was pregnant?” “And they took my milk!”
In a tender lovemaking scene that is all the more powerful because it comes immediately after this account of unimaginable barbarity, Paul D traces the scars:
Raising his fingers to the hooks of her dress, he knew without seeing them or hearing any sigh that the tears were coming fast. And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, “Aw, Lord, girl.” And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years. What she knew was that the responsibility for her breats, at last, was in somebody’s else’s hands.
Someone else who treats this back tenderly is the poor white woman Amy Denver, who is taking a significant risk by assisting a runaway slave:
Whoever planted that tree beat Mr. Buddy by a mile. Glad I ain’t you. Well, spiderwebs is ’bout all I can do for you. What’s in here ain’t enough. I’ll look outside. Could use moss, but sometimes bugs and things is in it. Maybe I ought to break them blossoms open. Get that pus to running, you think? Wonder what God had in mind. You must of did something. Don’t run off nowhere now.
And then:
Sethe could hear her humming away in the bushes as she hunted spiderwebs. A humming she concentrated on because as soon as Amy ducked out the baby began to stretch. Good question, she was thinking. What did He have in mind? Amy had left the back of Sethe’s dress open and now a tail of wind hit it, taking the pain down a step. A relief that let her feel the lesser pain of her sore tongue. Amy returned with two palmfuls of web, which she cleaned of prey and then draped on Sethe’s back, saying it was like stringing a tree for Christmas.
Isn’t it revealing that those book banners who attack Beloved identify with the slave owners rather than Amy? They see themselves as attacked for their racism rather than imagining themselves as the white characters (there are several in the novel) who help this Black woman. The companionship that arises between Amy and Sethe, which includes Amy helping with the delivery of Sethe’s baby, leads to this beautiful moment:
On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue. They never expected to see each other again in this world and at the moment couldn’t care less. But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller [slave catcher] passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. But no pateroller came and no preacher….There was nothing to disturb them at their work. So they did it appropriately and well.
While many Americans are flabbergasted at the way that MAGA is trying to erase the dark facts of slavery from history, I myself have seen it before. When I was 12 and studying Tennessee history in a segregated school system, barely any mention was made of slavery. Instead, we were informed that the real cause of “the War between the States” (they didn’t call it the Civil War) was economic, as though slavery did not have major economic ramifications. In fact, there was barely any mention of it and no mention at all of Jim Crow.
Nor was it only African Americans who were left out. In the chapter on Andrew Jackson, there was no mention of the Trail of Tears, even though the trail ran right through the school grounds. Nor did our book question the unjust invasion of Mexico carried out by James K. Polk, another slave-owning president from Tennessee.
I wrote last Friday about the moment when I realized, as a child in the early 1960s, the importance of learning about African American history. Only when members of my generation became teachers, professors and librarians did the educational system start acknowledging Black history and Black literature—oh, and the same for women, LGBTQ+ folk, and other minorities. It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, that people who want to return to the 1950s would be waging these educational battles.
History and literature are never static. Don’t expect the battles to end.
Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles’s 1948 film
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Wednesday
As I note in my book Better Living through Literature, allusions to great works can deepen the national conversations we have about important issues. I came across a couple of good examples this past week, one from Shakespeare, one from Henry James.
First of all, there was political commentator Jay Kuo applying an image from Macbeth to urge the Democrats to stay strong against the Trump administration as it trashes the Constitution. The minority party is filibustering a bill to keep funding the government, their aim being to persuade the GOP to reverse the ruinous July healthcare cuts. If allowed to go into effect, these cuts will lead to rural hospital closures and millions of Americans losing their insurance.
Kuo explains why the Democrats should stick to their guns—or, as we’ll see in a moment, to their crossbows:
For our own sanity, and to win elections going forward, we need to begin to let the chips fall where they may with the Trump economy and GOP budget. If that means a government shutdown and even mass firings of federal workers (which is happening anyway even without a shutdown), then we need to make peace with that. Even if it means acceleration of Project 2025, it’s time for the Christian Nationalists to show their true agenda more plainly for the electorate to see and experience. If we are going to face it all anyway, we might as well force their hand now before even more of our remaining guardrails are gone.
Now for the quote from Macbeth:
When we screw our courage to the sticking point, and we hold fast to the truth that the only way out is through, we will also discover what we have sorely lacked till now: a true fighting spirit. We need deep clarity of purpose in our resistance to the fascist takeover. We cannot blink, we cannot falter, we cannot capitulate.
“Screwing our courage” is an image taken from crossbows: when they are wound up to the limit, it’s time to fire. Lady Macbeth resorts to the image when she sees her husband beginning to get cold feet over killing his king, who at the time is a guest in his house. When you floated this idea initially to me, she angrily points out, you were a real man, but now you’re worried whether now is the right time and place for to show it:
What beast was’t, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man; And, to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place Did then adhere, and yet you would make both. They have made themselves, and that, their fitness, now Does unmake you.
Then she demonstrates, in one of Shakespeare’s most memorable and terrifying images, what real commitment looks like:
I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out had I so sworn as you have done to this.
In her subsequent pep talk, she uses the phrase quoted by Kuo:
Macbeth: If we should fail— Lady Macbeth We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking place And we’ll not fail.
It may be unsettling to think of the Democrats using the Macbeths as a model, especially as many more babies die as a result of Republican measures than Democratic. But in truth, the Democrats have been behaving a lot like King Duncan in recent years, blindly trusting that, in the end, Republicans would act in good faith. As the president increasingly resorts to fascist tactics–and as the Supreme Court increasingly gives him the power to renege on any negotiated Congressional spending agreements–they must use whatever limited power they have left to the fullest. As Kamala Harris recently put it, they must “fight fire with fire.”
While it’s true that Trump and the GOP has considerably more fire power than the Democrats, when the choice is to fight or die, the decision is fairly easy. If Duncan had foreseen what was coming, he would not have gone to sleep that night.
The other literary allusion appeared in an Atlantic by Tom Nichols, former professor at the U.S. Naval War College. Searching for reasons why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would bring 800 military leaders and generals together for an in-person meeting in Virginia, Nichols turned to James’s Turn of the Screw for the most plausible explanation.
First, here’s Nichols criticizing the idea:
Hegseth has had a lot of bad ideas, but this one is disruptive and even somewhat dangerous. All of these men and women have real jobs they should be doing. Even if Hegseth is calling this meeting to discuss serious issues of national defense—and so far, the Pentagon has given no such indications—few things are important enough to justify the security risk of putting the entire top U.S. military command, the secretary of defense, and the president all in the same room.
Miles, the seemingly angelic boy in James’s ghost story, disturbs his governess by going outside at night. We’re never sure why—is it to commune with the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessup, the former gamekeeper and governess?—but the governess can’t bring herself to directly confront him about this act of disobedience. In an elliptical and frustrating interchange with Miles, they get to talking about why he behaves as he does:
“And you can’t say I’ve not been awfully good, can you?”
I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t say that, Miles.”
“Except just that one night, you know—!”
“That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he.
“Why, when I went down—went out of the house.”
“Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.”
“You forget?”—he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. “Why, it was to show you I could!”
“Oh, yes, you could.”
“And I can again.”
Here’s Nichols:
In the end, I suspect that Hegseth is trying to bolster his stature by flexing his bureaucratic muscles. He’s disrupting the work and daily life of hundreds of people to emphasize that he has the power to do so. Like Trump himself, Hegseth seems to feel the need to do things that others think are unwise as a way of demonstrating toughness and independence. Both men remind me of Miles, the creepy child in the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw. When Miles misbehaves, his governess asks him why he would do such a thing. “Why, it was to show you I could!” he says. “And I can again.”
For those who know the book, Nichols’s use of the episode captures just how spine-chilling this moment was, made all the more so by Trump ruminating about using American cities as training grounds for the military and national guard.
Well, we’ve been shown that the president and his secretary could. Which for them, if not for Miles, is the point.
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Tuesday
I’m only just now examining the title of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes. He couldn’t have chosen a better literary allusion.
Sirens’ Call is an important contribution to our understanding of the modern world. Here’s the description on its website:
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.”
Hayes goes on to argue that our attention has become “a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.” Nor is that all. As Hayes sees it, our very humanity is at stake. As he puts it:
Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.
Here’s the poem’s version of the allure and the resulting destruction. Does it describe anyone you know?
If anyone goes near them in ignorance, and listens to their voices, that man will never travel to his home and never make his wife and children happy to have him back with them again. The Sirens who sit there in their meadow will seduce him with piercing songs. Around them lie great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones their skin all shriveled up.
Hayes is playing the role of Circe, whose warning this is. While I haven’t read Hayes’s book, I expect his advice is similar to hers: while we shouldn’t close our ears to what’s going on, we must find ways to stay true to our purpose. In Odysseus’s case, this involves having his men bind him to the mast of his ship. It’s a necessary precaution since the sirens’ call is impossible to resist.
For some reason, I remembered the sirens’ temptations as sexual, but when I returned to the poem, I discovered that they were instead promising information. They understand their man well given that Odysseus is the wisest—or at any rate, the most cunning—of the Greeks:
Odysseus! Come here! You are well known from many stories! Glory of the Greeks! Now stop your ship and listen to our voices. All those who pass this way hear honeyed song, poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy, and they go on their way with greater knowledge since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered in Troy, by the gods’ will; and we know what happens anywhere on earth. (Trans. Emily Wilson)
One can imagine Hayes himself struggling against the ropes, given that he too is brilliant, able to marshal and synthesize a vast array of political facts at a moment’s notice. Social media and the internet, of course, aid him in his work, which is why he wrote this book for himself as much as for the rest of us. He understands only too well the sirens’ call.
Even though it’s doubtful whether the sirens themselves can actually deliver on their promise, the internet can. Never before have we had instant access to “what happens anywhere on earth.” Odysseus struggling in his ropes is like a teenager who has been deprived of his phone:
Their song was so melodious, I longed to listen more. I told my men to free me. I scowled at them, but they kept rowing on.
Actually I owe teenagers an apology here. Many adults feel just as deprived when the power goes out, rendering their phones, laptops and MacBooks useless.
Some have offered, as solutions, various versions of the “wax in ears” treatment that Odysseus administers to his men, but that’s ultimately not realistic. Better to find ways to find a balance between self-restraint and openness, as Odysseus does. Hayes’s book helps us remain self-aware as we guard against being devoured.
“Phiz,” Fortitude and Impatience (illus. for Bleak House)
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Monday
Of all the red lines that Donald Trump has crossed, ordering the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies may be the reddest (although the competition is fierce). In the case of former FBI James Comey, Trump had to fire a seasoned prosecutor and name a flunky in his place to have his suit brought. Few expect the case to succeed.
Courtroom success may not be the ultimate object, however, as novelist and political commentator Greg Olear observed last December. Applying Dickens’s Bleak House to Trump, Olear predicted that the incoming president would use Jarndyce v. Jarndyce tactics to go after his enemies.
The case, which is at the heart of the novel, is shrouded in fog and driven by avarice:
Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their color and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery…
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is so complex that it baffles everyone who comes in contact with it:
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.
While the case against Comey is also confusing, at least it shouldn’t last long as long as Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which goes on for generations. If a judge doesn’t summarily throw out the suit on the grounds of malignant prosecution, the former FBI director has the right to a speedy trial. Another difference is that, whereas the purpose of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is for lawyers to make money—”The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself,” Dickens writes—Trump’s goal is “to sap his critics of time, money, energy, and the will to live.”
That difference being noted, however, the effect is the same. Trump, who loses most of the suits he initiates, understands that the point is not winning them but bringing them. Olear points to the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson, who had to hire lawyers to defend him against a frivolous defamation suit. “If the purpose of terror is to terrorize,” Wilson said,
the purpose of lawfare is also to terrorize. The tools and techniques of lawfare, particularly these loonbucket defamation suits, would terrify people without means, experience, and strong legal representation.
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is miraculously settled at the exact moment that all the money runs out. (Dickens reports that “the whole estate is found to have been absorbed in costs.”) Similarly, we can anticipate that all the lawsuits that Trump is directing the Justice Department to instigate will miraculously vanish the moment he leaves office.
Unfortunately, in the novel some good people are irremediably broken by the experience.
Not the lawyers, however, who have a good laugh at everyone’s expense.
