What Makes a Nation Strong? Not Fascism

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2025
Norman Rockwell, The Spirit of America

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Thursday

As Trump attempts to turn America into an oligarchy while targeting his domestic enemies and fantasizing about territorial expansion, it’s time to dust off, once again, William Ralph Emerson’s “A Nation’s Strength.” It works as a searing indictment of Trump, Elon Musk, the GOP, and Trump’s worshipful supporters.

Don’t look to wealth, military might, or arrogant boasting if you wish to be great, Emerson declares. Rather, look to the character of its people. “Only men can make/ A people great and strong,” he tells us. “Men who for truth and honor’s sake/ Stand fast and suffer long.”

And then:

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly…

Protesters resisting Trumpism are beginning to speak out all over America. As the president and Musk assault the Constitution, labeling anyone who disagrees with them as “traitors” and “domestic terrorists,” Emerson’s words remind us to remain true to America’s founding ideals.

A Nation’s Strength
By William Ralph Emerson

What makes a nation’s pillars high
And its foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor’s sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly…
They build a nation’s pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

The pillars are tottering at the moment but they haven’t fallen yet. Nor will they as long as brave men and women, drawing on America’s Enlightenment tradition, strive to make their voices heard.

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How May Justus Broke Racial Barriers

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2025

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Wednesday

As I comb through childhood memories for a talk I’m giving tomorrow, I’ve just reread, for the first time in 60 years, a civil rights children’s book that was dedicated to me and my brothers. New Boy in School (you can read it here) is about an African American boy who, attending a newly integrated school, discovers he is the only student of color in his class. The book is so close to the experience of the one Black kid in my own seventh grade class that I can’t help but wonder if author May Justus borrowed some of it from me. Maybe I shared my encounter with Ronnie Staten with her, or at least with my parents.

There’s no way I’ll ever know and it doesn’t really matter but it’s fun to think about. Here’s the story:

As I’ve reported in the past, I grew up in the Appalachian south—in Sewanee, Tennessee—and as a child I was one of the child plaintiffs in a landmark civil rights case. In 1961 four White families and four Black sued the Franklin County Board of Education on behalf of their children for failure to integrate. Citing the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, we won the case and integration took place in two stages. In the first year only a few of Sewanee’s Black children entered Sewanee Public School while full integration happened the following year. Ronnie was the one Black placed in my seventh-grade class.

On his first day, I made a special point of reaching out to him on the playground. While he appeared to appreciate it, he was more interested in joining the other boys playing basketball. I realized at the time that it was probably the best thing he could do to speed acceptance but was glad I made the effort.

Closely watching the progress of Sewanee’s integration was Miss Justus (as we called her), who lived 10 miles away. An accomplished author, Miss Justus had come to the area with fellow teacher Vera McCampbell in 1931 as part of a John Dewey-inspired educational experiment. Dewey’s philosophy is that practical and abstract education should go hand in hand so that, for instance, one learns arithmetic from buying groceries and reading from undertaking various life tasks. Miss Justus initially set up a one-room school where the kids cut firewood and cooked their own lunches, and later in life she wrote a Little Golden Book about the approach (The Wonderful School of Miss Tillie O’Toole).

Not long after Miss Justus and Miss McCampbell set up their school, Myles Horton established the legendary Highlander Folk School nearby. Originally established to support Appalachian coal miners, Highlander moved into civil rights activism in the 1950s. As the only integrated conference center in the south, Highlander became a hub of the civil rights movement with activists from all over the south gathering to discuss and share strategies and approaches. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, and others attended the workshops, and Miss Justus, who appreciated what Highlander was doing, volunteered herself to be the organization’s secretary and treasurer.

Although the state of Tennessee eventually chased Highlander out of Grundy County, Miss Justus stayed. Looking back I’m surprised that she didn’t experience more flack for her Highlander association. Maybe she was too famous and too beloved. Her friend Vera, however—now teaching in the public school system—was fired a year before she was due to collect her pension in a particularly vindictive move.

In any event, the suit against Franklin County had been partly the brainchild of Septima Clark, an extraordinary African American woman who was Highlander’s education coordinator, so that she, Miss Justus, and the Sewanee families were all in regular contact. Out of these associations came New Boy in School.

Unusual for 1963, the book has a Black protagonist, Lennie, whose family has just moved into the area. Terribly unhappy, Lennie hides from the other students but is befriended by Terry, who reaches out. The following day, Lennie brings a ball to class, which evolves into a collective game. Finally, after one final bout of shyness about performing for a school program, Lennie realizes he can contribute a song his father has taught him and all ends well. Maybe Miss Justus saw me as Terry.

I’m wondering if New Boy in School captures at all how Ronnie felt on his first day. (The book probably should have been dedicated to him, but Miss Justus didn’t know the Statens as she knew the Bateses.) While all the Whites are unrealistically nice—the n-word never makes an appearance—the book is good at capturing Lennie’s intense anxiety:

Lennie said nothing. Somehow he was a little afraid in this fine new school. It all seemed so strange to him. Most of the faces about him were friendly–Miss Baker’s and those of the children—but they were white faces.

“There are so many of them,” said Lennie, “and only one of me.” Yes, Lennie was the only Negro boy in the room.

And further on:

When it was time for reading class Lennie paid no attention. He just sat there behind his book. When it was time for recess, and all the children ran outside Lennie stayed in the schoolroom.

Finally Miss Baker took him by the hand, and tried to get him to join in a singing game. As soon as she turned him loose though, Lennie ran off. When the children laughed at him, he hid behind a big bush that grew in a corner of the schoolyard.

As I say, Ronnie was not this shy and I recall an extraordinary moment when a student called him the n-word directly to his face. Ronnie just looked at him and smiled, deflating the student utterly. It’s a moment I will never forget. Years later, I learned that Sarah Staten, Ronnie’s remarkable mother, had coached her kids to do just that.

I am keenly aware, now that I have grandchildren of color, how vital it is to have book protagonists that one can identify with. My grandchildren take it for granted that, of course, book characters will be of multiple races and ethnicities. At the time Miss Justus wrote New Boy in School, however, such books were very few in number. Even Black schools were using the white suburbia Dick, Jane, and Sally books to teach reading.

Of all her books, Miss Justus always said she was proudest of New Boy in School. I myself am proud to have played a role in its creation.

Additional note: Rereading how Lennie wins over his class by his singing, I am reminded of my segregated Boy Scout troop as I was growing up. In one of our summer jamborees—perhaps in 1962—we encountered an all-black troop. My fellow scouts had many unkind things to say about them until we heard them sing, at which point their harmonics put everyone to shame. We had never heard such singing.

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Caught Up in a Flood of Remembrance

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2025
My mother and brother David in 1956

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Tuesday

On Thursday I will be giving a talk on what it was like to grow up in Sewanee, Tennessee, where Julia and I have retired. Sewanee is one of those places that reminds people of Mayberry, the idyllic small town in the 1960’s sit-com The Andy Griffith Show. After all, everyone knew each other back then, and as a kid I could bicycle to school, to my friends’ houses, to the swimming lake, to the baseball field, to–well–just about anywhere.

It wasn’t perfect, the biggest blight being segregation. Now, of course, we’re no longer segregated but we might just as well be as most of the African American community has migrated to the valley, where there’s cheaper housing. High house prices are also discouraging families with children from living here, which means that it’s lost some of its vibrancy. I’ve learned that, in Thomas Wolfe’s immortal words, one can’t go home again.

For my talk, however, I’m putting that aside and recalling early memories. To that end, I have been going through my mother’s old scrapbooks and also old slides and strips of film, all of which she preserved.  D.H. Lawrence’s “Piano,” which has long been one of my favorite poems, captures some of the emotional roller coaster I’ve been going through. The fact that my mother was a piano player adds to the feelings.

The Piano
By D. H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Okay, so I haven’t been weeping. Nevertheless, my heart is being pulled, especially since I have now lost both parents and one of my brothers. And then there’s Chris Mayfield, the girl I was attracted to in third through fifth grade and whom I’ve long ago lost track of. As they look out at me through old photographs, “the glamour of childish days is upon me.”

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Percy Shelley’s Cry for Freedom

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2025
George Cruikshank, detail from The Massacre of Peterloo

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Monday

Imagine that you’ve just watched the military responding to a peaceful demonstration of 60,000 with murderous force, killing a dozen or more and wounding anywhere from 400-700. The crowd is demonstrating over high tariffs, which are pushing up the price of staples. And although the poor are struggling with cost of living, political Christians don’t appear to care.

The military, meanwhile, has the full support of both the government’s chief executive and the ruling party in the Senate.  All the while, the executive head appears checked out, except for when it comes to leeching off the public purse.

In other words, Percy Shelley’s sonnet “England in 1819” could be describing America in 2025—and America as it may become given how Donald Trump has long fantasized about the American military shooting demonstrators in the legs.

Shelley’s actual targets are the mad King George III and his soon-to-be successor, Prince Regent George. In 1819, British cavalry charged Manchester demonstrators calling for universal male suffrage and an end to the Corn Laws, which maintained tariffs on cheap foreign grain imports. What landowners regarded as economic protection, however, led to scarcity, famine, and unemployment.

The Tory government’s response to the massacre was to pass “the Six Acts,” which “were aimed at suppressing any meetings for the purpose of radical reform” (Wikipedia).

Poetry Foundation’s Christopher Spaide describes the poem as “two breathless, run-on sentences, running on rage, racing through reasons to despair about “the actual state” of England before veering, determinedly, toward a cautious optimism.” The poem was too revolutionary to be published in 1819 but saw the light of day after Shelley died. Here it is:

England in 1819
By Percy Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,—
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.

Since many of us are wondering what it will take to stop leech-like Donald Trump and Elon Musk—along with their Christless Christian supporters—from carrying out their own liberticide project, does the poem offer any hope? When Spaide says “cautious optimism,” he’s looking at the word “may.” It’s possible that the glorious phantom of liberty may arise from the graves of the political martyrs.

Shelley is right about one thing: the desire for liberty never goes away. Shelley’s once suppressed poem has become one of those enduring works that have inspired generations of patriots dedicated to freedom. We can continue to turn to it as resistance to Trumpism grows.

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A Mary Oliver Poem for Lent

By Robin Bates | Published: March 8, 2025

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First Sunday in Lent

In the past when observing Lent, I’ve shared Madeleine L’Engle’s poem “For Lent, 1966,” which opens, “It is my Lent to break my Lent,/ To eat when I would fast.”  In writing it, she is distancing herself from the tradition that Lent is a time to invite suffering. As the 14th century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sees it, Lent is a time to deny the body. As the poet puts it,

After Christmas there came the cold cheer of Lent,
When with fish and plainer fate our flesh we reprove.

Now, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written at a time when Christians had a tortured relationship with nature and the body, the Black Death having swept through England a few years earlier, killing a third of the population. Perhaps hair shirts and self-flagellation were coping mechanisms, a way of showing contempt for the vulnerable body. For our own Lenten discipline, L’Engle chooses rather to focus on social activities that feed the soul. As I wrote in my post on her poem, she vows

to listen—really listen—to others, and she will talk when she’d rather retreat into herself. To truly belong to Christ, she will try to “turn from none who would call on me.” In other words, she will take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.

It is in this spirit that Mary Oliver writes “Wild Geese,” which can also be regarded as a corrective to the medieval vision of Lent. “You do not have to be good,” she writes before clarifying that, by being good, she means, “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert.” Jesus of course entered the desert to fast and meditate immediately after his baptism by John the Baptist (Luke 4:1-13 in today’s Gospel reading), but like L’Engle, Oliver is not interested in reproving the flesh.

Instead, she tells us, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.” In my reading of Sir Gawain, the Green Knight is a nature spirit trying to tell the knight something similar. That Gawain is more interested in beating himself up—and doing his own version of walking on his knees through the desert—shows us what a challenge this can be.

Oliver tries to make her challenge to us sound as appealing as possible with gorgeous images of fertility:

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Somewhat like L’Engle, Oliver mentions communicating with others—“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine”—and then she provides a counter to this despair. We can have a connection with creation by opening ourselves to it. When we feel lonely, we can listen to the wild geese, whose “harsh and exciting” call comes to us out of the “clear blue air.” Perhaps, like the Holy Spirit who visited Jesus in the form of a dove, they too remind us that we have a transcendent home. “The family of things” awaits us.

If you are searching for a Lenten discipline, consider regular walks in nature. With your phone turned off.

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

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

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Middlemarch and Trump vs. Expertise

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2025
Douglas Hodge as the accomplished doctor Lydgate in Middlemarch

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Friday

My faculty book group is currently discussing Middlemarch, and one of our members pointed out a passage highlighting just how relevant the novel is to present day America. George Eliot has her own version of how Trump and Musk are firing experts and replacing them with toadies.

What results is incompetent governance. Everyone suffers except for, well, the incompetents and also those vultures who know how to take advantage of the resulting chaos.

The expert in Middlemarch is Lydgate, an accomplished doctor who wishes to reform the county’s outdated medical practices and to build a hospital. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand how local politics is played. His naiveté, which leads him to think he will be rewarded if he does a good job, reminds me somewhat of Joe Biden. Here’s the sentence that caught our attention:

This was one of the difficulties of moving in good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification for any salaried office. 

The observation comes in a scene where Lydgate is observing that he believes that the old boys’ system should be replaced by a meritocracy. “In general,” he says, “appointments

are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking. The fittest man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most agreeable. Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and put them out of the question.

Unfortunately for him, he voices his opinion to some of these good old boys. There’s Dr. Sprague, who thirty years previously published a treatise on Meningitis and who is suspicious of what he regards as Lydgate’s “showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders.” And then there’s the coroner, who doesn’t see it as his business to conduct post-mortems.

Shortly after our discussion I encountered a news story about an Iowa senate subcommittee advancing a bill that would charge doctors with a $500 misdemeanor for administering the Covid vaccine. Apparently Republican state senator Dennis Guth voted to advance the bill “after reading an email from a constituent who claims she was injured from an mRNA vaccine.”

The vaccine, of course, has saved tens of thousands of lives and medical experts find it to be safe. But what’s that to politicians who are sure they know better?

Guth would feel right at home in Middlemarch society.

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Beowulf’s Advice for Battling Depression

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2025

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Thursday

Back in 2012 I wrote the book How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage. While I knew the title was hyperbolic, I wanted people to realize that poets in the past had recognized and provided powerful responses to problems we continue to face. A question I have for myself is whether my optimism still holds up 13 years later, given the dark turn that American politics has taken.

The same monsters continue to plague us: troll resentment (Grendel), troll desire for revenge (Grendel’s Mother), and dragon depression. The weapons that Beowulf uses to counter these monsters still have some effectiveness although Trumpian fascism is providing a stiffer challenge than I anticipated in 2012. For instance, I’m no longer as confident that the giant sword used by Beowulf to slay Grendel’s Mother is as readily available.

Grendel’s grieving mother was embodied in the Tea Partiers at the time that I wrote the book and can be found in Trump’s supporters. Grieving over their vision of a lost America, they demand that others suffer to assuage their hurt. In 2012 I thought that America’s sword was made up of such foundational documents as “The Declaration of Independence,” The Constitution, “The Gettysburg Address,” Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and that it could withstand the anger. In the poem, that sword comes to Beowulf’s aid when he is being subjected to relentless attacks of vengeful rage. I didn’t anticipate that, in our case, the attacks would be directed at those very ideals.

I don’t think Americans have entirely abandoned those ideals, so there’s reason for hope in that quarter. I want to focus in today’s post, however, on the third monster in the poem. The Dragon visits a country that has been safe and prosperous for 50 years. Geatland under Beowulf is so secure that no invader dares attack, and unlike some of the bad kings in the poem, Beowulf is a good and generous king. But he does have an existential crisis: he looks back over his past history and, instead of a glorious trajectory, he sees one meaningless death after another. There is no forward-looking idealism, none of the youthful bravado we saw in the young Beowulf. He is aging out and we learn that, once he dies, the country will be swarmed over by Geatland’s enemies—the Frisians, the Franks, the Swedes, and others.

For a while after Trump’s election, Democrats and liberals like myself became dragon depressed, hunkering down in our caves and feeling sorry for ourselves. This is the Dragon that gets Beowulf in the end.

Only—and this is important—Beowulf goes out fighting the Dragon rather than surrendering to it. Although he dies in the effort, as we all must, he is able to prevail. That’s because he learns to accept the help of another. He and his nephew Wiglaf fight the dragon together. Prior to this collaborative effort, Beowulf has thought he must fight the enemy alone, which is itself a dragon trait.

In my book, which was partly an attempt to persuade readers to coalesce behind Obama’s candidacy, I wrote the following. To update it, substitute “Democratic Party” for “leaders.” What matters is a collective response:

We can learn from Wiglaf, a young warrior witnessing his first fighting, that the important thing is not our disillusionment but the battle itself. Regardless of how our leaders have disappointed us, Wiglaf teaches us that it is still our responsibility to engage with them against a common enemy. That enemy’s destructive power, after all, is far more significant than any mistakes our leader might have made.

Like many Obama supporters, Wiglaf knows that his leader has brought some of his problems on himself. He even points out that the king has insisted on going his own way, which has had serious consequences. “Often when one man follows his own will,” he observes, “many are hurt.”

Nevertheless, Wiglaf goes to Beowulf’s rescue anyway, seeing it as his job to bolster the man who leads his people. Wiglaf’s speech shows the potential for youthful idealism to reinvigorate the elderly:

Go on, dear Beowulf, do everything
you said you would when you were still young
and vowed you would never let your name and fame
be dimmed while you lived.  Your deeds are famous,
so stay resolute, my lord, defend your life now
with the whole of your strength.  I shall stand by you.

The message of Beowulf-Wiglaf’s victory is that neither leader nor allies can defeat the dragon alone. We must do it together.

There’s every temptation, when one is feeling discouraged, to become a dragon. One can withdraw, feeling bitter and sorry for oneself, but that only concedes the field of battle to the enemy. Better to find others who are similarly concerned and join forces. Together you can remind each other why the battle is meaningful and achieve goals that would be unreachable had you ventured out by yourself.

In short, we’re all together in the business of saving democracy. If we do so our legacy, like Beowulf’s funeral shrine, will be like a shining beacon serving to guide future generations over “dark seas.”

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Böll on Desperately Clinging to the Past

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2025
A German family Christmas

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Wednesday

A few weeks ago I led a discussion about the enjoyable German film Goodbye, Lenin. In it, a loyal believer in the East German Communist Party (at least people think she’s a believer) suffers a heart attack and goes into a coma. The wall comes down while she’s out of it, and upon her coming to, the doctor warns her family that a second shock will kill her. As a result, her family works to create an alternative reality, going to extraordinary lengths to assure her that nothing has changed.

The film, I believe, owes something to the Henrich Böll short story “Christmas Not Just Once a Year,” written six years after the end of World War II. I bring it up today because I think it helps explain Donald Trump’s continuing hold on his followers. Even though it appears that the president’s measures will hurt everyone who isn’t wealthy, Böll’s story makes it clear that people will endure a great deal of pain to keep an illusion alive. While liberals are hoping that people will turn from the president as inflation soars, people lose their jobs, and entitlement programs are slashed, “Christmas Not Just Once” cautions that disenchantment will not come easily or quickly.

In the story, which can be regarded as a black comedy parable, a beloved aunt insists on maintaining beloved Christmas rituals despite the war. Eventually, however, the apologetic narrator—apologetic because he doesn’t like to revive unpleasant memories—relates how the ceremonies come to an end:

Again at the risk of making myself very unpopular, I must mention in passing that the number of air raids on our city was indeed considerable, to say nothing of their violence. At any rate, my aunt’s Christmas tree fell victim—the thread of my narrative forbids my mentioning other victims—to modern warfare; foreign ballistic experts temporarily snuffed out its existence.

Once the war is over, however, the ceremony resumes:

I well remember the day we were invited to my uncle’s home. It was in January 1947, and bitterly cold outside. But indoors it was warm, and there was no shortage of things to eat. And when the lights were put out, the candles lit, when the dwarfs began to hammer, the angel whispered “Peace,” and again, “Peace,” I felt transported back into an era that I had assumed to be past.

This longing for the past, however, becomes a real problem. Even though times change, Aunt Milla can’t change with them, and the ending of Christmas precipitates a crisis:

When my cousin Johannes, on Candlemas Eve, after the tree had been lit for the last time, began to detach the dwarfs from their clips, my aunt, until then such a gentle soul, set up a pitiful wail, a wail so violent and sudden that my cousin was startled, and lost control over the gently swaying tree. Then it happened: there was a tinkling and a ringing, dwarfs and bells, anvils and all-surmounting angel—everything crashed to the floor, and my aunt screamed.

Nor does the screaming stop, even though neurologists and psychiatrists are brought in:

Only the strongest medication yielded a few hours of quiet; however, the dose of Luminal that can be given daily to a sixty-year-old woman without endangering her life is unfortunately rather small. But it is torture to have in the house a woman screaming at the top of her voice; by the second day the family was already totally distraught. Even the comforting words of the priest, who always celebrated Christmas Eve with the family, had no effect: my aunt screamed.

It so happens that she can be calmed only by a resumption of Christmas festivities. Before long, the family finds itself celebrating Christmas every day.

Despite the uncle’s firm hand, which insists on everyone participating in the charade, eventually the strain becomes too great, tearing the family apart. By the end of two years, two members have fled the country, one has been institutionalized, the uncle is engaging in shady business practices to finance the operation (he has also taken a mistress), and a nephew has joined a monastery.  Meanwhile, professional actors have taken the place of the older family members. At one point the narrator stops by and witnesses the following scene:

It was a warm summer’s evening when I passed by there, and even as I turned the corner into the chestnut avenue I could hear the words “Christmas glitter decks the forests …” …I crept slowly up to the house and looked through a gap in the curtains into the room: the resemblance of the playactors to the relatives they were representing was so startling that for a moment I could not make out who actually was in charge—as they call it—that evening. I could not see the dwarfs,
but I could hear them. Their chirping tinkle is on wavelengths that penetrate every wall. The whispering of the angel was inaudible. My aunt seemed genuinely happy…The children were playing with dolls and toy wagons in a corner of the room: they looked pale and wan. Perhaps something really should be done about them, after all. It occurred to me that they might be replaced by wax dummies, the kind used in drugstore windows to promote milk powder and skin cream.

When Böll wrote his story, many Germans wanted to pretend that World War II had never happened and that they could return to the good old days. Watching the narrator slide around the facts of the war is like watching Trump voters pretend that he never instigated an attack on the Capitol or that he is not currently assaulting the Constitution and handing the country over to Russia. Note the narrator’s hurried insistence to get back to what interests him:

During the years 1939 to 1945 there was a war on. In wartime there is a lot of singing, shooting, talking, fighting, starving, and dying—and bombs are dropped, all disagreeable things with which I have no intention of boring my contemporaries. I must merely mention them because the war had a bearing on the story I wish to tell. For the war was registered by my Aunt Milla merely as a force that began as early as Christmas 1939 to jeopardize her Christmas tree. 

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

A number of Americans are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to push back the clock and pretend that the last 60 or so years never happened. Some are still traumatized that we had a Black president and almost had a second one. Their dream is to return to an America where white men are in charge, where everyone goes to Christian churches, where abortion and homosexuality are illegal, where women and people of color and Jews know their place, and where gas is 30 cents a gallon. They will scream—and scream and scream—until Daddy steps in and gives them back the reality they long for.

Meanwhile, thanks to their determined efforts, the nation falls apart around them. But at least they’ve won the “War on Christmas.”

Historical note: My father, who was a translator during World War II, spent several months in Munich after the Germans surrendered. (He saw Dachau three days after it was liberated.) A very sweet man, I saw him express anger only twice in his letters home and once was over the refusal of everyday Germans to take any responsibility for what they had done. Böll captures this evasiveness in his story.

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What Musk’s Favorite Books Reveal

By Robin Bates | Published: March 3, 2025

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Tuesday

Unlike our titular president, our actual president (i.e., Elon Musk) is a reader. Or at least he has informed us which books are amongst his favorites. (I’ve already written about his love for Lord of the Rings.) Because favorite books can tell us a lot about someone—apparently the only book Trump’s first wife ever saw him read was a collection of Hitler’s speeches—I examine what Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide of the Galaxy, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot tell us about the man who has set his goons upon our governmental agencies, firing people willy nilly while sucking up private information.

Oh, and did I mention steering governmental contracts into his own pockets?

Atlas Shrugged is predictably to be found on the list, as it is on the list of many who think they are too smart for the rest of the world. It’s worth noting that the novel has been paired with Lord of the Rings in a memorable blog comment by one John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

In Atlas Shrugged, various corporation heads, including millionaire John Galt, are at war with the regulatory state. Feeling victimized, they shrug off social responsibilities and go on strike. Without their entrepreneurial spirit, society collapses, at which point the billionaires return to build a new world on the ruins. The work is an exercise in libertarian thinking that indulges in such infantile grievances as that they are not properly appreciated, and that the world will miss them when they’re gone.

Musk is currently busy making sure there are plenty of ruins to build on. Actually, the dynamic of his destruction is probably more like that described by activist Naomi Klein in her work The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. As she describes it, the “disaster capitalism complex” exploits moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies. Where the current situation is slightly different is that Musk is actually creating a crisis where there weren’t crises before. You can be sure, however, that he’ll take full advantage of the mayhem he is creating.

The other fantasy in Ayn Rand’s novels is of the self-made man who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps. Of course, as the son of wealthy South Africans Musk had plenty of help along the way, including from the United States government. In his search for “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government, he reminds me of the father of Major Major in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, who is a farmer paid for not growing alfalfa:

Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could. He was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere.

“The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we could take as much as we could grab with both of them,” he preached with ardor on the courthouse steps or in the front of the A&P as he waited for the bad-tempered gum-chewing young cashier he was after to step outside and give him a nasty look. “If the Lord didn’t want us to take as much as we could get,” he preached, “He wouldn’t have given us two good hands to take it with.” And the others murmured, “Amen.”

Major Major’s father had a Calvinist’s faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone’s misfortunes but his own were expressions of God’s will . . .

Ayn Rand’s novels empower people like Musk to run roughshod over others. From reading them, libertarian billionaires can imagine themselves as protagonists in an heroic drama.

I’m not intimately acquainted with those works from the so-called “golden age of science fiction” mentioned by Musk—The Foundation Trilogy and Stranger in a Strange Land—but I’m not surprised that they would have attracted him. Foundation is about a galactic empire falling apart and about one man’s attempt to save the future. One can see how it would feed into Musk’s megalomania.

Stranger, meanwhile, is about a Martian-raised immigrant (Valentine Michael Smith) who, upon coming to earth, founds a new religion that will reorganize society and culture. He is not appreciated for his contributions and ultimately killed, but his followers prepare to carry out his vision. The only part of the novel that Musk doesn’t care for is the ending (“it kind of goes off the rails at the end”), with its hint that Smith is an incarnation of the archangel Michael. Why venture into spirituality, one can imagine Musk asking, when the rest of the novel describes his aspirations for the strange land to which he immigrated at 21.

Science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was very technologically oriented, with scientific engineers—always men—seeking way to impose their will on their surroundings. It would change later under the influence of such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel Delaney, who were more interested in sci-fi as a metaphor for interior states of mind. But although Musk would have started reading sci-fi when they were in their heyday, he appears have preferred the earlier technocratic stuff.

His preferences here help explain why he likes Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While I too love Adams’s satire, this satire is aimed at 1950’s style sci-fi, and there is very little about the intricacy of human relationships in it. I wonder if Musk identifies at all with Zaphod Beeblebrox, a character with an ego the size of the universe. (My post asking whether Zaphod or Trump has a bigger ego can be found here.)

Waiting for Godot is also an emotionally barren work. In fact, all of the works mentioned by Musk lack human complexity and love. And yes, this goes for Lord of the Rings as well, at least when it comes to male-female relationships.

In the final analysis, Musk has been drawn to literature that doesn’t challenge him emotionally and that encourages him to indulge in conquest fantasies. And as I noted in my post on his Tolkien fixation, he fails to take away the author’s main point, which is that power without humility and without compassion corrupts.

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