SCOTUS’s Return to The Jungle

By Robin Bates | Published: January 17, 2024

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Thursday

Few American novels have had the policy impact of Upton Sinclair’s Jungle. After the author, in 1904, spent several weeks working incognito in Chicago’s stockyards, he published his exposé. Jack London, invoking another work that changed history, described The Jungle as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.” What really horrified many readers, however, was not all the bad things that happen to Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and his family after he sustains a work-related injury. Rather, it was their discovery about the meat they were eating.

The novel led to a government inspection of Chicago meat packing plants, which in turn resulted in various sanitation reforms, including the 1906 Meat Inspection Act.

I mention this today because there’s a chance that our rightwing Supreme Court will use a case currently before it (Loper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo) to gut government agencies’ ability to regulate such practices. I owe this awareness to blogger Thom Hartmann, who recently spelled out some of the possible consequences. The justices, he wrote, could destroy the ability of:

— the EPA to regulate pollutants,
— the USDA to keep our food supply safe,
— the FDA to oversee drugs going onto the market,
— OSHA to protect workers,
— the CPSC to keep dangerous toys and consumer products off the market,
— the FTC to regulate monopolies,
— the DOT to come up with highway and automobile safety standards,
— the ATF to regulate guns,
— the Interior Department to regulate drilling and mining on federal lands,
— the Forest Service to protect our woodlands and rivers,
— the FCC to protect us from internet predators,
— and the Department of Labor to protect workers’ rights.

Hartmann then mentions the Jungle:

Far-right conservatives and libertarians have been working for this destruction of agencies — the ultimate in deregulation — ever since the first regulatory agencies came into being with the 1906 creation of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, a response to Upton Sinclair’s bestselling horror story published that year (The Jungle) about American slaughterhouses and meat-packing operations.

Chris Geidner at Law Dork reported that the rightwing justices appear to be champing at the bit to move regulation from the agencies to the judiciary. Neil Gorsuch, son of the woman whom Ronald Reagan hired to gut the clean air act, repeatedly cut off the Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar as he attacked the deference that, since 1984, has been accorded to the agencies. Just as the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent on abortion, so it may overturn 40 years of precedent in the current case.

So imagine going back to a version of the following, as described by Sinclair:

And then there was the condemned meat industry, with its endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers, and that they were paid by the United States government to certify that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local political machine! And shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene—and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded into boxcars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.

Sinclair relates other horrors by means of worker observations:

Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle butcher for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning only; and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place would have been worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on “whisky-malt,” the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called “steerly”—which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man’s sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was stuff such as this that made the “embalmed beef” that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.

And then there are other tainted items, which are all the impoverished Lithuanian family can afford:

When the children were not well at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts—and how was she to know that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes?  Conservatives and libertarians are always going on about the nanny state, forgetting how many protections we have learned to take for granted. With a rightwing justice in Texas threatening to deprive us to of the abortion pill mifepristone and this Sumpreme Court rulings that wetlands—marshes, swamps, bogs, and other similar areas—are not to be considered “waters” covered by the Clean Water Act—we can see the writing on the wall. Maybe this Supreme Court won’t take us all the way back to 1904 but this is no time for complacency.

Conservatives and libertarians are always going on about the nanny state, forgetting how many protections we have learned to take for granted. With a rightwing justice in Texas threatening to deprive us of the abortion pill mifepristone and this Supreme Court ruling last year that wetlands—marshes, swamps, bogs, and other similar areas—are not to be considered “waters” covered by the Clean Water Act, we can see the writing on the wall. Maybe the Supremes won’t take us all the way back to 1904, but they can still do a lot of damage.

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Oliver: With Intense Cold Comes Honesty

By Robin Bates | Published: January 16, 2024

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Monday

It seldom drops to 0 degrees in Tennessee, but yesterday we faced wind chill temperatures of -2. My brother in Iowa City, meanwhile, experience a wind chill of -40. I therefore share, once again, a post I wrote nine years ago on Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem.” While these frigid temperatures are causing a great deal of misery, Oliver finds “tree-splitting” cold at least gives us a chance to get real.

Cold Poem
By Mary Oliver

Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.
I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handsful of grain.
Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe
that is what it means, the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.
In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

I understand Oliver to be saying that, when we are in the grip of extreme cold–when we feel the breath of death upon us–that is when we value life the most. Just as the polar bear’s life-saving suet keeps it alive in extreme conditions, so we focus on our essential life at such moments as this. Dreaming of summer’s luminous fruit becomes an extraneous luxury.

Our “hard knife-edged love,” Oliver tells us, is for our “own bones,” for “the warm river of the I.” We must acknowledge the life force that burns within us.

That’s why we are so fascinated by “the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals”: we identify with this battle between life and death and know that, in this primal struggle, we need, no less than the shark, to take into ourselves the bodies of others. That’s why we find a beauty in cold.

The cold season, Oliver says, is a season of cruelty and of honesty. Hold that thought in your mind the next time you take a step out into sub-zero temperatures.

Further thought: As I honored Mary Oliver’s life following her death in 2019, I talked about her views of death and her views of Christianity. She was also an author of numerous depression poems, which stand in dramatic contrast to her ecstasy poems. (I wonder if, like many of our greatest poets, she had bipolar disorder.) Her insight in “Cold Poem” tracks with something that psychologist/philosopher Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul about the value of depression:

Faced with depression, we might ask ourselves, “What is it doing here? Does it have some necessary role to play?”…

Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in a dark mood. Suppress the mood, and you will suppress those ideas and reflections. Depression may be as important a channel for valuable “negative” feelings, as expressions of affection are for the emotions of love…Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.

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The Wonder of First Snow

By Robin Bates | Published: January 15, 2024


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Tuesday

Snow, which has been hammering much of the country (including Iowa City and Madison, where two of my brothers live), finally came to Tennessee. With Mary Oliver, who is also describing her “First Snow” of the year,

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, it’s white
rhetoric everywhere…

Oliver sees the snow as a kind of “rhetoric”— the art of effective communication—because it asks of us foundational or existential questions. She says the loveliness

call[s] us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning…

The snowfall asks its oracular questions not calmly but feverishly, with a flowing energy that never seems to ebb. Only deep in the night, in the immense silence following the storm–when the broad fields “smolder with light” and “the heavens hold a million candles”–does there seem to be time to ask whether the questions have been answered.

And the answer to that is yes and no. There is no traditional answer as we normally understand it. And yet, a landscape with trees that  “glitter like castles of ribbons” “feels like one.”

First Snow
By Mary Oliver

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, it’s white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain—not a single
answer has been found—
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

As Christians are in their Epiphany season, I considered using this poem this past Sunday. The Christmas message is one of renewal, a promise of new beginnings where we can walk out “into the silence and the light under the trees, and through the fields.”

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Dunbar and Angelou on Caged Birds

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2024
Maya Angelou


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Monday – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

While most people associate the line “I know why the caged bird sings” with Maya Angelou’s account of her childhood, she borrows the line from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s magnificent poem “Sympathy.” In the last stanza Dunbar writes,

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,–
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings–
I know why the caged bird sings!

After borrowing the line for her autobiography, Angelou then wrote her own “caged bird” poem. In her case, she contrasts the life of a bird that is caged with that of a bird that is free. I share her poem on Martin Luther King Day since he dreamed of a world in which everyone would be able to (in Angelou’s words) “leap on the back of the wind” and “dare[ ] to claim the sky”:

Caged Bird
By Maya Angelou

A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind   
and floats downstream   
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and   
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings   
with a fearful trill   
of things unknown   
but longed for still   
and his tune is heard   
on the distant hill   
for the caged bird   
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams   
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream   
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied   
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings   
with a fearful trill   
of things unknown   
but longed for still   
and his tune is heard   
on the distant hill   
for the caged bird   
sings of freedom.

Further thought: Yesterday, in our church’s Sunday Forum, we heard our Christian Formation Director, Jeanne Babb, give a talk on the role of music in non-violent resistance. As Jeannie cited various instances of the power of music, I thought back to a workshop I attended on Johns Island, South Carolina when I was a junior in high school.

The workshop was organized by legendary human rights worker Esau Jenkins, an African American businessman who set up adult literacy and citizenship classes for poor Blacks in the 1960s, as well as services for migrant and seasonal farm workers. My most vivid memory of the workshop is the half hour we spent singing freedom songs that had been adapted from spirituals. Not much adaptation was needed for many of songs since the spirituals had always been about freedom, only in disguise.   

Response from Reader Carl Rosin:

Thanks for this post, Robin. Angelou’s poem always makes me think of the musical concept of sampling: has the artist transformed the original enough to make it a new work, or is it derivative? Did Dunbar (whom I love: his “We Wear the Mask” strikes me as one of the five most powerful American poems of the past 150 years) really need an update — a cover version, to go back to the musical parlance?

What I appreciate most about Angelou is that her effort (successfully, nobly) reacquainted a modern audience with a poet who had slipped (undeservedly, sadly) into relative anonymity. She’s the country singer who reminds people how great Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is. I don’t have an opinion on the country song, by the way, but I do tend to evaluate Angelou’s “Caged Bird” as not nearly as great a poem as it is often made out to be.

My Response to Carl

I love this observation, Carl, which has gotten me thinking about “derivative,” sometimes seen as the ultimate poetic insult. (“His lips curled into a derisive sneer as he looked up from the manuscript. ‘It’s derivative,’ he said, casting the pages contemptuously on the floor.”) In Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” drama, authors are involved in an Oedipal battle with their predecessors, either finding their own voice or remaining forever in thrall to those giants that came before (as, to use one of his examples, Oscar Wilde as poet was to Keats). But some feminists have counterargued that, for women writers at least, it’s more like a community, where you feel nurtured by your predecessors rather than in competition with them. Angelou’s poem feels more in that vein. She freely acknowledges her debt, is grateful to it, and expands upon Dunbar vision.

For readers unfamiliar with Dunbar’s powerful poem, which I too love, here it is:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
       We wear the mask!

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The Stable Is Our Heart

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2024
Stanley Cooke, Follow the Star

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Sunday

Pastor Sue Schmidt alerted me to this comforting Epiphany poem by Madeleine L’Engle. I would say that it seems particularly timely this year only, given the way the world works, there’s always “war & tumult of war” going on somewhere. Also “fear & lust for power, license & greed and blight.” In other words, all things are always falling apart, making the poem timeless.

Christ is born, L’Engle reminds us, everywhere and every year. His stable is always our heart.

Into the Darkest Hour
By Madeleine L’Engle

It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss –
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.

It was a time like this
of fear & lust for power, 
license & greed and blight – 
and yet the Prince of bliss 
came into the darkest hour 
in quiet & silent light.

And in a time like this 
How celebrate his birth 
When all things fall apart? 
Ah! Wonderful it is 
with no room on the earth 
the stable is our heart.

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Florida School Pulls Paradise Lost

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2024
Gustave Doré, illus. from Paradise Lost

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Friday

In the early 1990s I became involved in a Toni Morrison controversy in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where I taught for 36 years. One of my former students, David Flood, was teaching a unit at Leonardtown High School in which he paired Huckleberry Finn with Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A student was offended by three pages in Morrison’s novel—probably the scene where Milkman trades trash talk with a man he meets in a country store—and his mother took the offending pages to the school superintendent. She in turn banned the teaching of the novel in all St. Mary’s County public high schools, a ban (I believe) that is still in effect.

I visited the superintendent’s office to complain—it didn’t do any good—but that’s not where I’m going with today’s post. Rather, I am recalling a response I wrote to someone who wrote a letter to the local newspaper claiming that Morrison was a mediocre author not worth studying. (The Nobel Prize, in his view, was not based on merit but was literary affirmative action.) At the time, the so-called canon wars were underway, and his argument was that teachers should be teaching great authors, not figures like Morrison.

Not only did I contend that Morrison had more than earned her place in the pantheon of great authors—I consider her comparable to Faulkner among America’s novelists—but I pointed out that there were other authors in the canon who had passages far more graphic than anything in Song of Solomon. Among the works I mentioned was Paradise Lost.

I had meant this as a dig at those who worship the canon without truly seeing it—there were many like this in those days, including Secretary of Education William Bennet and National Endowment of the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney—but I didn’t anticipate that, one day, someone would actually ban Paradise Lost for its salacious content. Thanks to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, however, that has now happened. Apparently Milton’s immortal epic is among the works pulled from school library shelves in Orange County, Florida.

According to the Orlando Sentinel,

A total of 673 books, from classics to best-sellers, have been removed from Orange County classrooms this year for fear they violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students.

The list of rejected books, which the district began compiling during the summer, will get another review from Orange County Public Schools staff, so some could eventually be put back on shelves. But for now, teachers who had them in their classrooms have been told to take them home or put them away so students cannot access them.

In addition to Paradise Lost, the books pulled include John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Morrison’s Beloved, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Alice Walker’s Color Purple, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Also on the list are popular novels by Stephen King, Sue Monk Kidd, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and John Irving.

According to dissenting Orange County School Board member Karen Castor Dentel, the books pulled represent “over censorship” by media specialists who fear they will be held responsible for every item on their shelves. Castor Dentel said that the Florida law is “creating this culture of fear within our media specialists and even teachers who just want to have a library in their classrooms, so kids have access.”

The Sentinel article reports that the new state training required for all media specialists is warning them to “err on the side of caution” when approving books. If they approve inappropriate books, they “can face criminal penalties and the loss of their teaching certificates.”

So imagine a State Board confronting a media specialist who failed to remove Paradise Lost with the following passages from Book II. First there’s Satan having sex with his daughter Sin, who has sprung Athena-like from his head. Sin is describing to her father and lover how he got her pregnant:

…familiar grown,
I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won
The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft
Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing
Becam’st enamored, and such joy thou took 
With me in secret, that my womb conceived
A growing burden.

What happens next is a nightmarish birth scene in which their child, Death, tears through Sin’s birth canal. Sin describes this horrendous birth as she introduces Satan to his son:

At last this odious offspring whom thou seest
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way
Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transform’d…

Believe it or not, the worst is yet to come. After being born, Death doesn’t waste any time but straightway proceeds to rape his mother, engendering a pack of hell hounds that emerge from her now reptilian nether regions:

I fled, but he pursued (though more, it seems, 
Inflamed with lust then 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… 

Earlier we have gotten a depiction of these hounds. The hideous birth has transformed Sin’s nether regions into something snake-like:

The one seemed Woman to the waist, and fair, 
But ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent armed
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing barked
With wide Cerberian 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.

These hounds, meanwhile, continue to interbreed so that more are

                                    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; then bursting forth [ 800 ]
A fresh with conscious terrors vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.

It’s a nightmare straight out of Dante’s Inferno (is that on the Orange County list?), a powerful image of how sin is perpetually breeding more sin.

And now let’s turn to the Adam and Eve episodes. The two wander around naked, engaging first in good sex (this before the fall) and then bad sex (this after the fall). Milton was controversial in having them engage in sex before the fall but his point is that sex itself isn’t bad. In fact, it’s a gift that God “declares pure and commands to some, leaves free to all.” Those who think otherwise—who bid us abstain from sex—are parroting Satan. His words apply well to the Orange County School Board:

Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence, 
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain
But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?

Where sex goes wrong, in Milton’s eyes, is when it becomes bound up with power and ego. Lustful sex, he would say, is what the Chairman of the Florida Republican Party and his wife, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, were having with a third party, a relationship that ultimately culminated in a rape. Here’s Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s bad sex:

                 …but that false Fruit
Far other operation first displayed,
Carnal desire enflaming, he on Eve
Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him
As wantonly repaid; in Lust they burn: 
Till Adam thus ‘gan Eve to dalliance move…

And a little later:

So said he, and forbore not glance or toy
Of amorous intent, well understood 
Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire.
Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank,
Thick overhead with verdant roof embowered
He led her nothing loath; Flowers were the Couch,
Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel, 
And Hyacinth, Earth’s freshest softest lap.
There they their fill of Love and Love’s disport
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the Seal,
The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep
Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play.

The thrill that Adam and Eve experience comes from their disobedience. As Norman Mailer once wrote, guilt gives sex an existential edge. Whether or not one agrees with Milton, he includes sex in his work because, like all great authors, he is exploring all that goes with being human, which includes the sexual component. It’s what those other great works banned by Orange County—East of Eden, Madame Bovary, Beloved, Color Purple, Love in the Time of Cholera—are also doing.

The real perverts are not the authors who explore sex and the teachers and librarians who teach their works. The real perverts are those who, like Pentheus in Euripides’s The Bacchae, refuse to see sex as a gift and a joy. When Pentheus is condemning the women of the city, who have joined Dionysus to dance in the countryside, the prophet Teiresias tells him,

I am sorry to say it, but you are mad. Totally mad.
And no drug could help you, even though you’re as sick
as if you had been drugged.

Think of how many MAGA politicians and activists this describes.

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Truth in ’24, a Pearl of Great Price

By Robin Bates | Published: January 10, 2024

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Thursday

In a Monday speech at the Charleston church that eight years ago saw a mass shooting, President Biden talked about how white supremacy is a poison that is ripping this country apart. Biden also criticized those people who are trying to whitewash American history and argued for truth, which in the words of Martin Luther King “shall make us free.” As Biden himself is going up against “the big lie” that he didn’t actually win the 2020, truth is of particular concern to him, and his remarks reminded me of what 18th century British poet William Cowper says about truth.

In his Charleston remarks Biden observed,

The truth is under assault in America. As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our very country, because without the truth, there’s no light. Without light there’s no path from this darkness.

In The Task, a long chain-of-association poem, Cowper talks about truth being a precious commodity that is nevertheless spurned by much of the world. When he says that the “proud, uncandid, insincere or negligent inquirer” looks with contempt at books that express the truth and reproaches ministers that do the same, I think of those in our own society who would dismiss Biden’s words as just politics. Some people are so jaded or partisan that they cannot hear what this good man is trying to tell them. Here’s the Cowper passage:

The only amaranthine flower on earth
Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.
But what is truth? ’twas Pilate’s question put
To truth itself, that deigned him no reply.
And wherefore? will not God impart His light
To them that ask it?—Freely—’tis His joy,
His glory, and His nature to impart.
But to the proud, uncandid, insincere,
Or negligent inquirer, not a spark.
What’s that which brings contempt upon a book
And him that writes it, though the style be neat,
The method clear, and argument exact?
That makes a minister in holy things
The joy of many, and the dread of more,
His name a theme for praise and for reproach?—
That, while it gives us worth in God’s account,
Depreciates and undoes us in our own?
What pearl is it that rich men cannot buy,
That learning is too proud to gather up,
But which the poor and the despised of all
Seek and obtain, and often find unsought?
Tell me, and I will tell thee what is truth.

Truth as a pearl is a reference to the parable (Matthew 13:45-46) about the kingdom of heaven, which Jesus says “is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”

Maybe political spinmeisters and the cynical press, like the rich and the learned, cannot see the truth that Biden references, but it is clear to those of us who (to borrow the words of the prophet Micah) act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. We recognize that the president’s words come from genuine empathy for others and from deep love of country.

Focusing on truth at the beginning of election season is not a bad place to start.

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Trump, “Vermin” and Terry Pratchett

By Robin Bates | Published: January 9, 2024

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Wednesday

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Donald Trump told a New Hampshire crowd in November, channeling Adolph Hitler in ways that stunned even those of us who thought that he had already scraped bottom. Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, which I’m currently listening to, has me thinking of Trump’s use of “vermin” since Pratchett villains use the word to justify exploiting, enslaving, and exterminating goblins, seen in the Discworld series as an historically oppressed race.

In the novel Commander Vimes, vacationing in the country, begins investigating the murder of a goblin woman, during which process he comes to see goblins in a new and sympathetic light. This particular encounter leads him to discover other crimes, including goblins being dragged from their caves and shipped off to parts unknown. When local police commissioner Feeney joins Vimes in the investigation, the Clerk to the Magistrates attempts to buy him off, telling him “not to bother about the goblin girl because goblins are officially vermin.”

In yesterday’s post, I noted Pratchett’s version of Pastor Martin Neimöller’s “first they came for…” Just as Trump starts with immigrants but soon is applying the word to all of his political opponents, Vimes tells the Clerk of the Magistrates that “once the goblins are vermin, then the poor are vermin, and the dwarfs are vermin, and the trolls are vermin.”

Snuff, while still containing Pratchett’s characteristic humor, is one of his angriest books as we see innocents killed and hearts broken. The author is so in love with the wondrousness of diversity that he feels violated to the core by those who deny others their full personhood. To cite again the observation of Granny Weatherwax, which appears in yesterday’s post on Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight, “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

This story, however, has a happy ending as a goblin girl named Tears of the Mushroom plays such celestial music on her harp that hearts and minds are changed, leading to new laws guaranteeing goblin rights. As Lord Vetinari, Lord Patrician of the city-state of Ank-Morpork, reports to Vimes,

Ankh-Morpork, the kingdom of the Low King [the dwarfs] and also that of the Diamond King [the trolls], Uberwald, Lancre and all the independent cities of the plain are passing a law to the effect that goblins will henceforth be considered as sapient beings, equal to, if not the same as, trolls and dwarfs and humans and werewolves, et cetera et cetera, answerable to what we have agreed to call “the common law” and also protected by it. This means killing one would be a capital crime. You have won, commander, you have won.

And he attributes it all to the music:

One spends one’s life scheming, negotiating, giving and taking and greasing such wheels as squeak, and in general doing one’s best to stop this battered old world from exploding into pieces. And now, because of a piece of music, Vimes, a piece of music, some very powerful states have agreed to work together to heal the problems of another autonomous state and, almost as collateral, turn some animals into people at a stroke.

We all wish it could happen this way. Unfortunately, even as African American contralto Marian Anderson, defying the Daughters of the American Revolution, wowed thousands with her celestial version of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at the Lincoln Memorial in 1955, Jim Crow still persisted for another ten years. Meanwhile, to this day, demagogues like Trump continue to characterize people of color as vermin.

Art helps but Vitineri’s scheming, negotiating, giving, taking and greasing are still necessary to “stop this battered old world from exploding into pieces.”

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Pratchett’s Response to Intolerance

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2024

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Tuesday

I have just finished listening to Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight, the fourth book in his Tiffany Aching series (which in turn makes up a part of his 41-book Discworld series). I see the brilliant Pratchett as a kind of postmodern Tolkien in that his world building is far more diverse and inclusive than Middle Earth. Rather than having elves, dwarfs, humans, hobbits and ents squaring off against trolls, goblins, orcs, and giant spiders, Pratchett has created a world in which all these figures (along with witches, vampires, werewolves, zombies, gorgons, and various other creatures from myth and folklore) must learn to get along if society is to survive. In other words, it sounds like our own world. Also, unlike Tolkien, Pratchett has a great sense of humor.

Tiffany Aching is a teenage witch who, by I Shall Wear Midnight, has established herself as the local witch in an area known as “the Chalk.” As witch, she functions mostly as doctor and veterinarian although she is also responsible for rescuing children kidnapped by fairies, guarding the population from various supernatural threats, advising the local baron, and so on.

In Midnight she must battle against a surge in anti-witch hysteria, which seems to arise from the storybook depictions of witches that everyone has grown up with. “Old stories, old rumors, and old picture books still seemed to have their own hold on the memory of the world,” the author observes.

Reading about such hysteria at the same time that we in the United States are witnessing the rise of Christofascism is illuminating. Previously hidden prejudices are suddenly fanned into open intolerance by a rabble-rousing priest known as “the Cunning Man.” Although he has died centuries before, Cunning Man has found a way to return to continue his mission. A shadowy figure with holes where his eyes should be, he spouts threats of hell and damnation as he goes after Tiffany, and his smell is as repulsive as his rhetoric. Tiffany always knows he is around because of his smell, a good metaphor for the hatred that populist demagogues stir up in their followers:

A stink. A stench. A foulness in her mind, dreadful and unforgiving. A compost of horrible ideas and rotted thoughts that made her want to take our her brain and wash it.

I can’t help but think of how Donald Trump is spurring his followers to hate immigrants, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ+ community, Democrats, moderate Republicans, and others, his own version of anti-witch hysteria. Pratchett has several passages describing how such sentiments can take over people’s minds and become lethal. For instance, people who have grown up with Tiffany or even have benefited from her healing ministrations suddenly regard her differently:

It’s always easier to blame somebody. And once you’ve called someone a witch, then you’d be amazed how many things you can blame her for.

Another passage helps explain MAGA hatred for undocumented immigrants, who are essential to our economy:

That was the problem with witchcraft: It was as if everybody needed the witches but hated the fact that they did, and somehow the hatred of the fact could become the hatred of the person.

As she encounters the hysteria, Tiffany remembers the words of one of her mentors, an old witch named Granny Weatherwax: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

We also encounter Pratchett’s version of the famous Martin Niemöller quote about “first they came for…”:

But it’s very easy to push an old lady down to the ground and take one of the doors off the barn and put it on top of her like a sandwich and pile stones on it until she can’t breathe anymore. And that makes all the badness go away. Except that it doesn’t. Because there are other things going on, and other old ladies. And when they run out, there are always old men. Always strangers. There’s always the outsider. And then, perhaps, one day, there’s always you. That’s when the madness stops. When there’s no one left to be mad.

And tempting though it is to put all the blame on witch finders and demagogues like Donald Trump, there’s an observation that runs through Midnight that is only too true of our own society. It to comes to Tiffany courtesy of Granny Weatherwax:

Poison goes where poison’s welcome.

One thing I’ve noticed about the rise of Trumpism is that it gives people permission to act out their own worst impulses. So it is with anti-witch hysteria in Midnight. For instance, there is a duchess who is

the kind of bully who forces her victim into retaliation, which therefore becomes the justification for further and nastier bullying, with collateral damage to any innocent bystanders who would be invited by the bully to put the blame for their discomfiture onto the victim.

One of the most terrifying aspects of such transformations is how they come to be taken for granted. Just as people barely pay attention when Trump channels Hitler or his followers cheer authoritarianism, Tiffany reports at one point, “I have seen horrible things, and some of them all the more horrible because they were, well, normal”

So what does Tiffany do? First, she calls out the hatred for what it is:

Your power is only rumor and lies, she thought. You bore your way into people when they are uncertain and weak and worried and frightened, and they think their enemy is other people when their enemy is, and always will be, you – the master of lies. Outside, you are fearsome; inside, you are nothing but weakness.

And then, like Beowulf standing up to Grendel, she declares, “Inside I am flint.”

So instead of running from the witch-burning fire, she runs towards it, leaping through it and coming out safely on the other side. The Cunning Man, meanwhile, is consumed by the flames.

Which is to say, respond to Christian fascism, not through fear or accommodation, but through confident assertions of tolerance and kindness and decency and, yes, humor. All these qualities are alive and well in Pratchett’s teenage witch, which is why I think every child should be encouraged to disappear into the Tiffany Aching series.

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