The Founders vs. Dostoyevsky’s Inquisitor

By Robin Bates | Published: May 5, 2024
Ferris, Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776


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Monday

A superb Washington Post article by Robert Kagan (gifted here) has put Donald Trump within the broader context of American history in a way I find very illuminating. When I sent it to my brothers, Jonathan said it put him in mind of Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, which in turn got me thinking about the Grand Inquisitor episode is Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov. Hang on while I explain.

According to Kagan’s article, which is adapted from his recent book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again (Penguin Random House), America’s Founders based the new republic “on a radical set of principles and assertions about government.” These principles and assertions were

that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.

Because they recognized how radical their ideas were, they also knew that “a new way of thinking and acting” was required. This new way set up inevitable conflicts from the very beginning since most people of the time thought and behaved differently. The Founders, Kagan says, were well aware of this, knowing

that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. 

Because the Declaration of Independence was so radical, a significant number of Americans kicked back against it and have been doing so ever since. Believing that America should be governed by White Protestants, they felt and have continued to feel “under siege” by the Founders’ liberalism, which Abraham Lincoln later endorsed and backed up by force.

In Lincoln’s vision, the Declaration of Independence was the nation’s “standard maxim,” with a goal of “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere”—and it is this vision that some rightwing political scientists today call “liberal totalitarianism.” They claim they are being deprived of their “freedom” to “live a life according to Christian teachings” and that the government favors various minority groups (especially Black people) at their expense. Kagan observes,

Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, … but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.

Kagan turns to various rightwing intellectuals to flesh out this counter vision, including Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen, and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule. He reports,

The smartest and most honest of [rightwing intellectuals] know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government.

What they have in mind, Katan says, is a Christian commonwealth—which is to say (here he quotes Vermeule),

 a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”

Since most Americans are not White Protestants—or even White Christians—these rightwing intellectuals believe that democracy must be overthrown. Kagan elaborates on their view:

The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”

In this view, Trump has been an essential albeit imperfect vehicle for counterrevolution. Kagan turns to Deneen to elaborate:

If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them.”

Kagan adds that this is “a most Leninist concept indeed.”

Now to The Brothers Karamazov although, interestingly enough, the Grand Inquisitor’s diatribe is directed against Christianity, not democracy. But there is a democratic strain within Christianity, and it is this to which he is objecting. In other words, parallels between the Grand Inquisitor and today’s Christian authoritarians hold up.

In Dostoevsky’s novel, the rational brother (Ivan) is debating with the spiritual brother (Alyosha) about the latter’s vision of God as loving and benevolent. Setting up a thought experiment where Jesus is arrested by the Inquisition when he returns to the world, Ivan argues that he makes inhuman demands on people. When Jesus rejects Satan’s temptations in the desert—bread, safety, and earthly power—and when he tells his followers that they must rely on faith rather than miracles—he is putting impossible and therefore cruel demands upon them. Only saints are capable of rising to the occasion, the Inquisitor contends:

Thou hast burdened man’s soul with anxieties hitherto unknown to him. Thirsting for human love freely given, seeking to enable man, seduced and charmed by Thee, to follow Thy path of his own free-will, instead of the old and wise law which held him in subjection, Thou hast given him the right henceforth to choose and freely decide what is good and bad for him, guided but by Thine image in his heart. But hast Thou never dreamt of the probability, nay, of the certainty, of that same man one day rejected finally, and controverting even Thine image and Thy truth, once he would find himself laden with such a terrible burden as freedom of choice? That a time would surely come when men would exclaim that Truth and Light cannot be in Thee, for no one could have left them in a greater perplexity and mental suffering than Thou has done, lading them with so many cares and insoluble problems.

In Escape from Freedom (1941), the book mentioned by my brother, Erich Fromm uses a similar idea to explain why certain Germans embraced fascism over democracy. Individual freedom, he argued, causes fear, anxiety, and alienation whereas authoritarianism provides them with a kind of relief. The Grand Inquisitor makes the same argument against Christ’s challenge, asserting, “Thou has suffered for mankind and its freedom, the present fate of men may be summed up in three words: Unrest, Confusion, Misery!”

By contrast, the Inquisitor contends, the authoritarian church offers happiness:

We will prove to them their own weakness and make them humble again, whilst with Thee they have learnt but pride, for Thou hast made more of them than they ever were worth. We will give them that quiet, humble happiness, which alone benefits such weak, foolish creatures as they are, and having once had proved to them their weakness, they will become timid and obedient, and gather around us as chickens around their hen. They will wonder at and feel a superstitious admiration for us, and feel proud to be led by men so powerful and wise that a handful of them can subject a flock a thousand millions strong. Gradually men will begin to fear us. They will nervously dread our slightest anger, their intellects will weaken, their eyes become as easily accessible to tears as those of children and women; but we will teach them an easy transition from grief and tears to laughter, childish joy and mirthful song.

The Grand Inquisitor goes on for a while longer but you get the point. Christ’s vision that every individual is beloved by God—it doesn’t matter whether you are high or low, slave or free, man or woman—was as radical in Roman times as the Declaration of Independence was in the 18th century. In fact, Christ’s radical ideas helped make the democratic revolutions possible. So it is not only Founder liberalism that America’s contemporary rightwing intellectuals are objecting to but people finding their own individual ways to God.

These intellectuals, in their arguments for a new elite, don’t mention the potential for abuse and corruption, which we witness in every authoritarian regime. They appear to see themselves exempt from the truism that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Similarly, the Grand Inquisitor speaks as though the authoritarian church actually cares about the common people rather than, first and foremost, about its own concerns. One need only do a quick glance at the history of humankind to realize that “benevolent dictator” is an oxymoron.

Americans are beginning to get glimpses of what a Christian Commonwealth would look like as librarians, teachers, and doctors are threatened with prison, women are forced to bring non-viable fetuses to term, asylum seekers are shot, and threats of violence against political opponents are regarded as an acceptable means of maintaining order. If we are to judge by the questions asked at Trump’s immunity hearing last week, some rightwing members of the Supreme Court see presidents as above the law (at least Republican presidents). In their questions, they didn’t laugh Trump’s lawyers out of court when they argued that a president should be free to assassinate opponents or stage a coup.

I imagine Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh reading the Grand Inquisitor’s words and applauding.

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This Is the Time of Loves

By Robin Bates | Published: May 4, 2024
Franz von Stuck, Sounds of Spring

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Sunday

As we are still in the Easter season, here’s Christina Rossetti’s lovely “Easter Carol.” Feel the pure joy as the poet makes full use of springtime imagery.

Easter Carol
By Christina Rossetti

Spring bursts today,
For Christ is risen and all the earth’s at play.

Flash forth, thou Sun,
The rain is over and gone, its work is done.

Winter is past,
Sweet Spring is come at last, is come at last.

Bud, Fig and Vine,
Bud, Olive, fat with fruit and oil and wine.

Break forth this morn
In roses, thou but yesterday a Thorn.

Uplift thy head,
O pure white Lily through the Winter dead.

Beside your dams
Leap and rejoice, you merry-making Lambs.

All Herds and Flocks
Rejoice, all Beasts of thickets and of rocks.

Sing, Creatures, sing,
Angels and Men and Birds and everything.

All notes of Doves
Fill all our world: this is the time of loves.

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Blake’s Warning about Radicals

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2024
Thomas Phillips, William Blake


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Friday

The presence of anti-Semitic campus leftists who lionize Hamas terrorism while arguing for the elimination of the state of Israel is taking me back to my college days, when both the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement had their share of extremists. I remember hearing Martin Luther King (this in Charleston in 1967) when he responded to Black militants with, “It’s not burn, baby, burn but build, baby, build.” Meanwhile, peaceful Vietnam War protesters were derided by the Underground Weathermen, who said they/we weren’t going far enough.

While leftwing militancy today doesn’t pose the same dangers as rightwing militancy—occupying college campuses isn’t the same existential threat to the country as seizing the Capitol, and we haven’t seen leftists implicated in mass shootings—it still must be called out. Gaza supporters directing hate speech against Jews are no less disturbing than Islamophobes and Palestinian haters. Few poets have better credentials for such calling out than William Blake, who does so in his poem “The Grey Monk.” More on this in a moment.

First, a little on my own activist background. Speaking as one who was arrested during a peaceful protest following the Kent State shootings—we blocked the Hennepin County draft induction center in Minneapolis for two hours before police came and, with no resistance from us, took us to Hennepin County jail—I remember thinking of Trotskyist, Maoist, anarchist, and Black militants as mostly bullshitters. But they also revealed a disturbing authoritarian streak that mirrored the very forces that they were opposing.

In fact, that authoritarian streak would reveal itself in time. Just as a number of 1950s Troskyists would become hardened reactionaries in the 1960s, so it was not surprising to see figures like the New Left’s David Horowitz and Black Power’s Eldridge Cleaver embrace the intolerant right.

Unlike them, Blake maintained a balanced perspective.

Blake’s activist credentials are beyond question. Here’s a summation:

In 1780, Blake was among the crowd that stormed Newgate Prison and freed its inmates. (The assault was the culmination of the Gordon Riots, a set of events that started as an anti-Catholic protest and turned into a fundamental challenge to inequality, the king, and an unrepresentative parliament.) In 1791, he wrote a long poem about the French Revolution. It was too admiring for even his left-wing publisher, John Johnson, to present to the public. Two years later, he wrote and illustrated a book, America a Prophecy, celebrated the American Revolution and endorsed abolitionism. In another book he published that year, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, he examined, through metaphor and personification, what is today called “rape culture” and argued for women’s sexual and creative emancipation. In 1804, Blake was charged with sedition for punching a soldier and allegedly saying, “Damn the king.”(It’s unclear if he actually uttered the phrase, though he wrote, in private literary notations, “Every Body hates a King.”

Blake’s activism put him at far greater risk than American activists in the 1960s and early 1970s. For his so-called sedition, which occurred when fears of a French invasion were high, he could have been executed. Only a good lawyer was able to get him off.

“Grey Monk” begins with a cry of suffering, one which those Palestinian and Israeli parents of dead children can relate to:

I die I die the Mother said
My Children die for lack of Bread     
What more has the merciless Tyrant said
The Monk sat down on the Stony Bed    

The Grey Monk, an avatar for Blake himself, is a Christ-like witness to the suffering:

The blood red ran from the Grey Monks side
His hands & feet were wounded wide
His Body bent his arms & knees
Like to the roots of ancient trees

His eye was dry no tear could flow
A hollow groan first spoke his woe
He trembled & shudderd upon the Bed           
At length with a feeble cry he said

While God, Blake writes, has commanded him to write to protest injustice, he acknowledges that his writing could elicit an opposite response than that which he desires. That’s the reason for his feeble, almost defeated, cry. He embraces love but is seeing his protest lead to hatred and violence, which are “the Bane of all that on Earth I lovd”:

When God commanded this hand to write
In the studious hours of deep midnight
He told me the writing I wrote should prove     
The Bane of all that on Earth I lovd  

Before explaining how, he returns to his theme of suffering and of his own willingness to endure torture to say truth to power:         

My Brother starvd between two Walls
His Childrens Cry my Soul appalls
I mockd at the wrack & griding chain             
My bent body mocks their torturing pain  

Then, however, comes the response he fears. He probably is thinking foremost of the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution:       

Thy Father drew his sword in the North
With his thousands strong he marched forth
Thy Brother has armd himself in Steel     
To avenge the wrongs thy Children feel 

And now the caution. Only love, not force, can “free the World from fear.” His declaration that “a tear in an Intellectual Thing”—an apparently contradictory statement since tears are of the heart rather than of the head—is (I think) a response to how people regarded the French Revolution as an outgrowth of the Age of Reason. While a revolutionary himself, Blake believes that the heart rather than the head must take the lead: 

But vain the Sword & vain the Bow
They never can work Wars overthrow
The Hermits Prayer & the Widows tear
Alone can free the World from fear

For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing        
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King
And the bitter groan of the Martyrs woe 
Is an Arrow from the Almighties Bow

And then Blake’s grand finale, which is a warning that every activist should memorize and hold close:

The hand of Vengeance found the Bed     
To which the Purple Tyrant fled
The iron hand crushd the Tyrants head
And became a Tyrant in his stead”

From long history we know this truth only too well. Since the founding of Israel, the Middle East has been witnessing non-stop tit-for-tat vengeance. In practically every instance, tyranny has proved the victor.

Yes, we must speak out against suffering, Blake’s Grey Monk tells us. But we must do so with humility and care, knowing that even well-intentioned protesters can have their own inner tyrant.

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Milton’s Sin as a Symbol for the GOP

By Robin Bates | Published: May 1, 2024
Rowlandson, Sin makes peace between Satan and Death in Paradise Lost

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Thursday

It’s not every day that I see a political commentator casually citing a phrase from Paradise Lost, but NeverTrumper Charlie Sykes makes nice use of one. In an Atlantic article about partisanship and how Alexander Hamilton of the Federalists crossed party lines to support Thomas Jefferson, thereby preventing the “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled” Aaron Burr from becoming president, Sykes writes,

Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton.

The phrase “compassed round” is used by Sin in Book II of Paradise Lost and it packs even more of a punch when one sees what she is referring to. Here’s the passage:

Here in perpetual agony and pain,
With terrors and with clamors compassed round
Of mine own brood, that on my bowels feed…

That’s right, she’s being compassed round by bowel-devouring hellhounds. Sykes has even internalized the Miltonic practice of suspending the verb until after a long prepositional phrase. Here’s the backstory:

Sin, who has sprung like Athena from Satan’s head and, after being raped by him, given birth to Death, has subsequently been set by God to watch over the gates of Hell. Her job is to make sure the rebel angels do not escape. While there, however, she is the victim of a second incestuous rape, this time by her son Death, after which she gives birth to hellhounds. These in turn start interbreeding while sheltering in her womb and feeding on her bowels. Here’s Milton’s grotesque description:

About her middle round
A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled
Within unseen.

And here’s her account of the incestuous rape that has brought it about:

I fled; but he [Death] pursued (though more, it seems,
Inflamed with lust than rage), and, swifter far,
Me overtook, his mother, all dismayed,
And, in embraces forcible and foul
Engendering with me, of that rape begot
These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry
Surround me, as thou saw’st—hourly conceived
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me; for, when they list, into the womb
That bred them they return, and howl, and gnaw
My bowels, their repast…

Through his allegory, which has been influenced by Dante’s Inferno and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton makes the point that sin traps us, ravages our being, and breeds ever more sin. When Sykes says that the current GOP is “compassed round” with “social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture,” he captures how it has been caught in a never-ending downward spiral. The image of hell-hounds ceaselessly barking “with wide Cerberean mouths full loud” captures well the rightwing echo chamber. (Cerberus, as you probably know, is the three-headed hound who guards the mouth of Hades.)

 Two examples Sykes mentions of people caught up in this hellish spiral are New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu and former Trump Attorney General Bill Bar. Even though they have both criticized Trump, have acknowledged that he attempted to overthrow the government, and admit that he committed multiple felonies, they now are prepared to vote for him in November.  In thinking they can steer what they regard as a middle course, they fail to realize that one either breaks altogether with Trump or becomes tarred by him. As long-time Republican consultant and now NeverTrumper Rick Wilson puts it, “Everything Trump touches dies.”

There are a few former Republicans—like Sykes and Wilson—who are actively trying to reestablish a moral compass within the GOP. Since he is familiar with Paradise Lost, I wonder if Sykes finds comfort in its ending, where the Archangel Michael assures Adam that evil will, in the end, be defeated. As Adam puts it after their conversation,

Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God, to walk
As in his presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on him sole depend,
Merciful over all his works, with good 
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek; that suffering for Truth’s sake
Is fortitude to highest victory…

To which Michael replies, “This having learnt, thou hast attained the sum of wisdom,” and then,

                            [O]nly add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,
By name to come call’d Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far…

Think how much better off our country would be if the GOP started putting Truth first. Think how conditions would improve if its leaders made good deeds, faith, virtue, patience, temperance, and charity their guiding watchwords. That’s how one breaks free of the horrors that compass us round.

Oh well, one can dream.

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They Shoot Puppies, Don’t They?

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

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Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, the cruelty is the point.

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Remembering My Eldest 24 Years Later

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

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Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the poem:

No Voyage
By Mary Oliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trumpian Darkness or True Light? Choose

By Robin Bates | Published: April 28, 2024

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Monday

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

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

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

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

Or as Henry Vaughan puts it,

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

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

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

 Here’s the poem:

The World
By Henry Vaughan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When Shepherds Fail Their Flocks

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

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Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then comes the Lord’s promise to the righteous:

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

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

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

The Good Shepherd
By Stanley Moss

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

Things can change, however, and in horrifying ways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Would Willy Loman Be a Trump Supporter?

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

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Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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