Trollope, Trump & Another Phrase for Lying

By Robin Bates | Published: June 20, 2023

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Wednesday

Our day-long car trip to and from our 50th Carleton reunion felt considerably shorter as we listened to the entirety of Anthony Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds. Last week I compared the scheming Lizzie Greystock’s determination to hang on to a diamond necklace to Donald Trump’s equally firm resolve to hold onto documents to which he had access while president. The major difference is that Lizzie may well have a right to the diamonds—the lawyers are unclear—whereas U.S. laws clearly state that the White House documents do not belong to Trump.

Both Lizzie and Trump share a similar relationship to truth, however. In fact, Lizzie is such a liar that she chooses her second husband based on his own penchant for lying:

She liked lies, thinking them to be more beautiful than truth. To lie readily and cleverly, recklessly and yet successfully, was, according to the lessons which she had learned, a necessity in woman and an added grace in man.

Only Lizzie does not call them lies. Fortunately for her, when the police major catches her committing perjury—she claims that he diamonds have been stolen when in fact only the box has been stolen, the diamonds having been hidden under her pillow—he provides her with a euphemism to make it easier for her to confess: she has given “an incorrect version of the facts.” Here’s their interchange after Major Mackintosh tells her what she can expect in the witness box:

“They will ask you to tell the truth.”

“Indeed I will do that,” said Lizzie,—not aware that, after so many lies, it might be difficult to tell the truth.

“And you will probably be asked to repeat it, this way and that, in a manner that will be troublesome to you. You see that here in London, and at Carlisle, you have—given incorrect versions.”

“I know I have. But the necklace was my own. There was nothing dishonest;—was there, Major Mackintosh? When they came to me at Carlisle I was so confused that I hardly knew what to tell them. And when I had once—given an incorrect version, you know, I didn’t know how to go back.”

“Incorrect version” becomes Lizzie’s preferred phrase from then on.

This puts her in a group with Kellyanne Conway, the senior counsel to Donald Trump who coined the phrase “alternative facts” to pump up attendance numbers for Trump’s inauguration and to speak about a “Bowling Green massacre” that never occurred. In his famous essay “The Politics of the English Language,” George Orwell cites such corruption of language as the means by which people “defend the indefensible.”

Lizzie and Kellyanne would be best friends.

Further thought: Lizzie also uses Trump’s delaying tactics, along with his practice of multiple, contradictory explanations, to defy a witness subpoena. The justice system finally gives up on her, which it so happens is how Trump has escaped accountability in the past.

Oh, and like Trump with his boxes of documents, transported between his Florida and New Jersey resorts, Lizzie insists on carrying her diamonds with her.

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A Memorial Service for Old Classmates

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2023

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Tuesday

Julia and I returned last night from our 50th Carleton reunion, which proved to be an emotional affair. Because many of us have retired, we spent time reflecting upon our work lives. One commonality I discovered is the number of “Carls” who have committed their lives to public service, whether in medicine, education, government, religion, or other fields. Although some have achieved a fair amount of public renown while others have worked quietly within their communities, many—perhaps most—have worked tirelessly to make the world a better place. As it was a goal we spoke openly about 50 years ago, it was heartening to see how many people have followed through.

In looking back, we also remembered those we have lost. (Out of 375 people, so far Carleton’s class of ’73 has lost 55.) Our special memorial service featured, as is fitting, much poetry. As I used to tell my students, poetry is language doing heavy lifting.

While I knew most of the poems, there were a couple that I encountered for the first time. One of these was George Eliot’s “The Choir Invisible,” which was particularly appropriate as it captured our sense of service. The poet aspires to joining “the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence…

“Immortal dead” does not necessarily mean famous. If, by our presence in people’s lives, we have encouraged them to be generous or brave or high minded—if we have, with mild persistence, urged their minds to “vaster issues”—then we have lived well. In fact, Eliot tells us that “so to live is heaven.”

It is heaven because, in conducting our lives in this fashion, we breathe a “beauteous order that controls/ With growing sway the growing life of man.” Eliot credits that choir invisible as the source of the “sweet purity for which we struggled.” To be sure, this goal is sometimes difficult to achieve, perhaps because of our rebellious flesh or flawed upbringing (we may still carry around us the shame instilled in us by vicious parents). Yet because of that music that is “the gladness of the world,” we can step into our “better self.”

Therefore Eliot asks in conclusion,

May I reach
That purest heaven—be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!

Many of those we lost are in that choir invisible and many of us who are still alive are auditioning for membership.

To repeat Eliot’s reminder, “So to live is heaven.”

The Choir Invisible
By George Eliot

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
Of miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds
To vaster issues.

   So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, failed and agonized
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,
Poor, anxious penitence is quick dissolved;
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air;
And all our rarer, better, truer self,
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burden of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better—saw rather
A worthier image for the sanctuary
And shaped it forth before the multitude,
Divinely human, raising worship so
To higher reverence more mixed with love—
That better self shall live till human Time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread forever.

   This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow.

   May I reach
That purest heaven—be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

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Another Poem about Bread

By Robin Bates | Published: June 18, 2023

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Monday

As we just attended our 50th Carleton reunion, I share a poem that one of my former hall mates alerted me to. Mike Hazard, a remarkable photographer and filmmaker from the twin cities read last Sunday’s post about bread poetry and informed me that I omitted one of the best.

It’s by Tom McGrath, who grew up on a North Dakota farm and often focused on working class themes. (You can watch Mike’s documentary on McGrath on Amazon Prime.) In my bread post, I said that Jesus was a poet in the way that he used bread as a key metaphor for his ministry.  Like some of the other poems I mentioned, McGrath takes Jesus’s assertion that he is “the bread of the world” and runs with it.

The poem begins by comparing a kitchen table to “Christmas white plains” and detects the resurrection story in the image of bread rising. As with those other bread poems, McGrath moves between the earthly and the transcendent aspects of bread. For instance, after alluding to the mystery of the risen Lord, McGrath moves on to another mystery which he finds no less profound:

But we who will eat the bread when we come in
Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery
That brings the bread to rise:

it is the love and faith
Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds
In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives
Of those around them…

But that, McGrath adds, is a “workaday story”—and because he is writing on a Friday, he wants to emphasize the transcendent weekend dimensions of bread.

Here’s the poem:

The Bread of the World
by Thomas McGrath

On the Christmas white plains of the floured and flowering kitchen table
The holy loaves of the bread are slowly being born:
Rising like low hills in the steepled pastures of light —
Lifting the prairie farmhouse afternoon on their arching backs.

It must be Friday, the bread tells us as it climbs
Out of itself like a poor man climbing up on a cross
Toward transfiguration.

And it is a Mystery, surely,
If we think that this bread rises only out of the enigma
That leavens the Apocalypse of yeast, or ascends on the beards and beads
Of a rosary and priesthood of barley those Friday heavens
Lofting…

But we who will eat the bread when we come in
Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery
That brings the bread to rise:

it is the love and faith
Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds
In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives
Of those around them…

just as we know it is hunger —
Our own and others — that gives all salt and savor to bread.

But that is a workaday story and this is the end of the week.

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Song Born from Newly Freed Throats

By Robin Bates | Published: June 17, 2023
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1875

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Spiritual Sunday

Here’s a fine sonnet sonnet by Tyehimba Jess for tomorrow’s celebration of Juneteenth. (Thanks to the blog Art and Theology for alerting me to it.) The poem is part of a sonnet sequence known as a crown, in which the last line of each poem is the first line of the next one and so on in a circle. I recently shared a John Donne poem from his own crown sequence.

Apparently it took Jess eight years to write his sequence. It’s about the famous Fisk Jubilee singers, a group organized in 1871 to raise money for Fisk College that popularized the Negro spiritual tradition. As Jess makes clear, the music that came from “newly freed throats” was a music of freedom. The poem mentions how the music grew out of slavery, how it was birthed from “storied depths of American sin” and “scored from dawn to dusk with coffle and lash” (note the musical pun). But it also emphasizes the joy of freedom, with “each note bursting loose from human bondage.”

Punning off of Psalm 96 (“O sing unto the Lord a new song”), it opens, “O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song.”

The poem appears in Jess’s collection “Olio,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Fisk Jubilee Proclamation
(CHORAL)
By Tyehimba Jess

O sing unto the Lord a new song . . . (Psalm 96)

O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song
born from newly freed throats. Sprung loose from lungs
once bound within bonded skin. Scored from dawn
to dusk with coffle and lash. Every tongue
unfurled as the body’s flag. Every breath
conjured despite loss we’ve had. Bear witness
to the birthing of our hymn from storied depths
of America’s sin. Soul-worn psalms, blessed
in our blood through dark lessons of the past
struggling to be heard. Behold—the bold sound
we’ve found in ourselves that was hidden, cast
out of the garden of freedom. It’s loud
and unbeaten, then soft as a newborn’s face—
each note bursting loose from human bondage.

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A Li-Young Lee Poem for Father’s Day

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2023
Guido Reni, St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus (c. 1635)

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Friday

For Father’s Day, which is Sunday, here’s one of the sweetest father-and-son poems that I know. I once heard poet Li-Young Lee read it at the college where I used to teach.

In the act of removing a splinter from his wife’s hand, the poet recalls a moment when his father did the same for him. He associates his father’s hands with tenderness, whether they were cupping his son’s face in his hands or bringing them together to pray for him. Perhaps the “flames of discipline/ he raised above my head” are an allusion to the Pentecostal flames since Lee’s remarkable father eventually turned to the ministry.

From a distance, it appears the father is “planting something in a boy’s palm,/ a silver tear, a tiny flame,” and in fact he is. We know that what he has planted has grown to fruition years later as Lee shows the same tenderness towards his wife.

The calming effect of the father—the adult Lee can “hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer”—keeps his son from resorting to melodrama (“Death visited here!”). Instead, the son returns to his father a gift of the same order that he has received: he tenderly kisses him.

The Gift
By Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

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McCarthy: Dark, Occasionally Hopeful

By Robin Bates | Published: June 14, 2023
Cormac McCarthy

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Thursday

Cormac McCarthy died on Tuesday, leaving behind him works that are indelibly imprinted on my mind. From the two that most stand out to me, I conclude that there were two McCarthys—one who believed that one could hold on to one’s dignity and sense of self in the face of the grimmest of challenges, the other that we all risk being annihilated by human darkness. All the Pretty Horses is my favorite in the first category while Blood Meridian still gives me nightmares as perhaps the bloodiest book I have ever read.

In Pretty Horses, 16-year-old John Grady Cole sets off for an open-ended adventure in Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. The start of their adventures, which contains a nod to the final lines of Paradise Lost (“the world lay all before them”), is positively lyrical:

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

If, like Adam and Eve, they are in fact leaving a world of innocence, they discover soon enough the darkness of the world. Eventually they see a 13-year-old boy who has joined them executed—he has killed a man to retrieve his stolen horse—and they themselves are thrown into a grim prison where they almost die. Yet in spite of it all, Grady holds on to what gives his life meaning, which is his love of horses and his love of a young woman he meets. Here’s a passage on the first love:

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.

Later, having lost the woman but retrieved his horse, he reflects on the tradeoffs he has made:

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

In Blood Meridian we see the blood of multitudes in excruciating detail. “The Kid” finds himself a member of the Glanton gang, a group of scalp hunters who have been given carte blanche to massacre Indians and then, having been unleashed, turn their violence on all they encounter. At the core of the group is Judge Holden, a seven-foot albino psychopath who takes on mythic proportions as the book progresses. Highly educated and highly skilled, he appears the very archetype of violence, one who is timeless and impossible to kill. As the judge sees it, war is at the foundation of life:

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.

Having recently immersed myself in William Faulkner, I see the Mississippi author’s influence on McCarthy. Just as Faulkner reveals America’s dark history with regard to African Americans, so McCarthy does so with native Americans and in the settlement of the west generally. Harold Bloom, who regards the author as a worthy successor to Herman Melville (especially Moby Dick) and sees Blood Meridian as “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed,”  says of Holden that he seems to “judge the entire earth,” one who holds sway “over all he encounters.”

McCarthy’s ability to look unblinkingly at human horror can have a cathartic effect, reports Will Carthcart, a reporter who has witnessed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine first hand. Cathcart was in Mariupol when the Russians attacked, was captured and then released, and then fled to Tbilisi, Georgia, where his pregnant wife awaited him. Cathcart writes,

Just before dawn, the Ukrainians seized a bridge that allowed us to escape. The drive out of Kherson still haunts me. So much of what I saw, heard, and smelled invoked a Cormac McCarthy novel. I had nothing else to compare it with. No one should.

Further on, quoting from McCarthy’s last novel The Passenger, Cathcart says that

Cormac McCarthy had provided me with a context, even a language, to internalize the things I saw and cannot unsee. Segments of human beings were stacked along the road between the smoking-bombed-out war machines.

“The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.”

Kherson is now free. But it will never be free of what happened. “A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.”

At this point in the article Cathcart also quotes Judge Holden:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Cathcart sums up some of the lessons he has taken from McCarthy:

If the proper authorities ever caught wind of the narcotic potency of such novels, all books would be banned, repackaged, and sold by prescription to inhabitants of wealthy countries.

Reading The Road, Suttree, and Outer Dark on those maddening plastic mattresses hovering above the bleached linoleum was a reminder that things could be worse. If McCarthy could stash poetic elevation and transformative prose in such awful worlds, I figured I could find it.

In college, I gleaned that Blood Meridian is a life guide for the futile brutality of Western civilization. Is there anything more distinctly American than MacGyvering your own gunpowder out of piss and bat shit to kill a bunch of Native Americans?

His son having been born soon after Cathcart escaped to Georgia, he also sees specific lessons to be learned from The Road. He quotes from an interchange between the dying father and the son, who are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland:

When Ethan asks me, “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?”
I will cough and spit blood onto the road. “Getting up this morning,” I will say to the boy.
I will tell him “To carry the fire.” And when he says he doesn’t know where the fire is.
I will tell him, “Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Dark though McCarthy seems, Cathcart sees him as an important reality check:

For 60 years, beginning with The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy has explored social decay and taboo with the radiant darkness of his poetic prose. It was up to us to find the light.

Even at his bleakest, he is holding back—leaving room for hope in the inconceivable tragedy. He provides us with the tools for us to fashion that hope or with the realization that we must let it fall into place like the ashes of a nuclear winter.

All of which leads Cathcart to a personal note of affirmation:

Once I wondered if it was insane to deliberately cause a new human. Now I wonder if it is insane not to.

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Authoritarians Long to Act with Impunity

By Robin Bates | Published: June 13, 2023

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Wednesday

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the world’s foremost authorities on fascism and authoritarian leaders, has written an insightful article on why the GOP is always willing to give Donald Trump a pass, even when his crimes are flagrant. While an urge to sheep-like conformity and a fear of Trumpian retribution are key motivators, Ben-Ghiat mentions an even more disturbing reason:

Something else drives [South Carolina Senator Lindsay] Graham and other GOP Trump devotees: the thrill of partnering with an amoral individual for whom there are no limits or restraints. Enablers of authoritarians always imagine the power they can wield when the rule of law has been vanquished.

Freedom from all limits or restraints is the central theme of H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man, and the novel is so applicable to authoritarian personalities in today’s America that I’ve written versions of today’s post on three previous occasions.

Trump showed Republicans what was possible in 2016 with his Access Hollywood pronouncement, “And when you’re a star, they let you [kiss beautiful women]. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The fact that he paid no price for that seemed to prove him right: when you have power and have dispensed with normal checks and balances, you can do anything.

On June 9, 2020, I applied Invisible Man to out-of-control cops. When the law routinely buries instances of them shoving, beating, and even killing people, I noted, they will continue to do so.

I reprinted the post again in June, 2021 on the six-month anniversary of Trump’s January 6 coup attempt. At the time I feared that Trump would escape all accountability for what happened. If he can operate in the world with absolute impunity, I warned, like Wells’s invisible man, he will repeat the same behaviors.

Few maxims are truer than “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s no accident that, upon learning the secret of invisibility, Wells’s protagonist immediately starts violating social norms. It’s an aspect of human nature that Plato explores in the Gyges ring parable that inspired Wells’s story.

The parable appears in Book 2 of The Republic. Arguing with Socrates that people behave justly only because they fear the consequences of not doing so, Glaucon recounts how the shepherd Gyges, after finding a ring that renders him invisible, proceeds to seduce the queen, murder the king, and become king himself. While people might publicly applaud a good man that didn’t take advantage of such a ring, Glaucon says, they would in actuality regard him as a fool.

Socrates counters that, rather than such freedom making Gyges happy, he will always be slave to his appetites. While I believe this to be true, this is of scant consolation to Gyges’s victims, just as George Floyd finds scant consolation in the fact that his killers may never find deep peace. Wells, however, has a different focus, the one mentioned by Ben-Ghiat: it can feel delicious to act out one’s dark impulses.

Griffin describes a “feeling of extraordinary elation” when he realizes that people can’t see him. Confiding his history to his college friend Kemp, he says he immediately burned down the house so that others wouldn’t discover his secrets:

“You fired the house!” exclaimed Kemp.

Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail—and no doubt it was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

He uses the word “impunity” again further on:

Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me.

Griffin proceeds to engage in the same range of behavior that we are seeing from bad cops, from shoving to outright killing. At the beginning, his social infractions are minor:

My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.

When Kent asks about “the common conventions of humanity,” Griffin replies that they are “all very well for common people.”

As Griffin’s madness grows, so do his dark ambitions. Thinking he has successfully enlisted Kemp, he plots ways to wield total power:

“And it is killing we must do, Kemp.”

“It is killing we must do,” repeated Kemp. “I’m listening to your plan, Griffin, but I’m not agreeing, mind. Why killing?”

“Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes; no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them.”

Note that he uses one of Trump’s favorite words here: “dominate.” He’s prepared to use violence if necessary.

A sadistic thrill comes with asserting your dominance over others, as rapists know well. The satisfaction does not go as deep as serving humankind—this is Socrates’s point—but Griffin, racist cops, and authoritarians like Trump don’t care. They prefer the rush of acting with utter freedom.

Or as Ben-Ghiat says of Congressman Jim Jordan, who is currently seeking to weaponize the House Judiciary Committee against his enemies: “[H]is “beady eyes positively gleam with anticipation.”

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Trump, His Enablers, and “The Third Man”

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2023
Cotten, Welles as Martins, Lime in The Third Man

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Tuesday

Greg Olear of the substack Prevail has written a smart essay comparing Trump and his enablers to Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Olear draws on both the 1949 film and the Graham Greene unpublished novella on which it is based (Greene wrote the work so he’d have a narrative basis for his screenplay) as he uses Lime’s monstrosity to cast a light on Trump’s.

 While I think Olear’s observations are spot-on, I want to push the parallels further since Greene depicts different levels of complicity with Lime’s crimes. In doing so, he provides insights into those who enable monstrosity as well as those principled souls who, despite previous loyalty, turn their back on it. We see examples of all of these in the Trump saga.

Let’s start with the monster first. Newly discovered penicillin is like gold in a post-World War II Vienna that is divided between the Americans, the British, the Soviets, and the French. Major Calloway, a member of Scotland Yard, explains shortages of this life-saving drug have led to it first being trafficked on the black market for exorbitant prices (“a phial would fetch anything up to seventy pounds”) and then, even worse, being diluted with water or sand. The consequences are horrific:

That isn’t so funny, of course, if you are suffering from V.D. Then the use of sand on a wound tht requires penicillin—well, it’s not healthy. Men have lost their legs and arms that way—and their lives. But perhaps what horrified me most was visiting the children’s hospital here. They had bought some of this penicillin for use against meningitis. A number of children simply died, and a number went off their heads. You can see them now in the mental ward.

Lime is no more concerned for these victims than Trump is for the victims of his various grifts. In the famous scene where Lime and his childhood friend Rollo Martins (Holly in the movie) are gazing down from the vantage point of Venice’s giant ferris wheel, the monster explains his reasoning:

Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. The only way you can save money nowadays.

And further on:

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, and so have I.

To which Olear, referring not only to Trump but to those who enable him, bursts out,

Who are these people? How do they sleep at night? Why are their moral compasses so defective? And why has our society allowed monsters like this to accumulate so much power, money, and influence?

Like Lime, Olear observes, there are people in today’s GOP who don’t think in terms of human beings. They “rally around blastocysts and their brutal version of Jesus,” he writes, “but mobilize against living, breathing humans who are refugees, or immigrants, or trans people, or rape victims.”

Olear observes that Greene “served in the British intelligence services in the war and knew a thing or two about human nature’s dark underbelly.”

As I say, however, there are levels of monstrosity, which is important if some of these people are to be peeled away from today’s extremists. Here’s how the different character’s in Greene’s novella shake out, along with their Trumpist equivalents:

–Holly Martins is a principled man who initially is willing to punch anyone who criticizes his childhood friend. When he hears about the penicillin scam and sees pictures of the children, however, he turns on Lime and helps the police track him down. Think of him as the former Republicans who have broken, not only with Trump, with his GOP enablers—which is to say, with most members of the GOP.

–Anna Schmidt is so in love with Lime that she cannot leave off her affection for him, even when she discovers what he has done. In the film (although not in the novella), she warns Lime that the police are looking for him. Think of her as those who feel so loyal to Trump that they are willing to keep supporting him, even though they wish he didn’t do some of the things he does. They also refuse to countenance Lime’s enemies, just as Anna in the film’s last scene gives Martins the cold shoulder.

–The other characters, more prominent in the novella than in the film, are those grifters who benefit from Lime’s schemes. Baron Kurtz is hand in glove with Lime, as is Winkler, a doctor involved in helping Lime fake his death early in the story. Think of them, perhaps, as the Roger Stones, Steve Bannons, and Rudy Giulianis of the Trump circle. On the other hand, Major Calloway thinks that the American military officer Cooler, while a beneficiary of Lime’s crimes, is not fully immersed in them. At any rate, Calloway lacks evidence  that “he was in on the penicillin racket.”

Finally there is Herr Koch, an innocent bystander who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In his case, he’s seen enough of Lime’s fake death to cast doubts on the affair and so must be bumped off. See him as one of the countless multitudes that have been harmed by Trump placing his own needs above those of his country.

Lime, Kurtz, Winkler are lost causes. But Calloway gets Martin to turn on his own friend and Cooler would rather be with the winners than the losers.  With Anna, I suspect, it will be a matter of time before she breaks with the man she loved—she needs time to grieve—but his crimes are so substantial enough to eat away at her loyalty. And with Koch, as with those Americans who think they can stay out of politics, we see that there is no safety to be found in just keeping one’s head down. Better to align oneself with those who represent responsible governance.

The NeverTrumpers represented the first schism in Republican ranks. Third Man shows that, when the pressure is ramped up, more schisms can arise.

Further note: Apparently the most famous quote from the film was written by Orson Welles rather than Greene.  It is chilling in its amorality:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

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Pilfered Files, Eustace Diamonds

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2023

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Monday

Julia and I are listening to Antony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds as we drive north to our Carleton reunion, and the novel is interacting in unsettling ways with the recent indictment of Donald Trump over pilfered documents. Lizzy Greystock Eustace, a young widow, insists that a precious diamond necklace worth 10,000 pounds belongs to her as a gift from her husband. The Eustace family, on the other hand, insists that it is a family heirloom that should remain in the family.

Although we’re only a third of a way into the novel, I already find myself being driven mad by her non-stop insistence that the jewels are hers. A peer who has proposed marriage threatens to withdraw his offer unless the diamonds are restored to the family, and even her sympathetic cousin Frank thinks that returning them will be better for her peace of mind.  She, however, is determined to retain possession. The more people push, the more she digs in:

“Peace!”—she exclaimed. “How am I to have peace? Remember the condition in which I find myself! Remember the manner in which that man [her fiancé] is treating me, when all the world has been told of my engagement to him! When I think of it my heart is so bitter that I am inclined to throw, not the diamonds, but myself from off the rocks. All that remains to me is the triumph of getting the better of my enemies. Mr. Camperdown [the Eusatace family lawyer] shall never have the diamonds. Even if they could prove that they did not belong to me, they should find them—gone.”

“I don’t think they can prove it.”

“I’ll flaunt them in the eyes of all of them till they do; and then—they shall be gone. And I’ll have such revenge on Lord Fawn before I have done with him, that he shall know that it may be worse to have to fight a woman than a man. Oh, Frank, I do not think that I am hard by nature, but these things make a woman hard.” 

Enraged at those who (in her eyes) want to rob her of what is hers, Lizzy fantasizes about various forms of punishment, especially against Lord Faun:

“But what right has he to treat me so? Did you ever before hear of such a thing? Why is he to be allowed to go back,—without punishment,—more than another?”

“What punishment would you wish?”

“That he should be beaten within an inch of his life;—and if the inch were not there, I should not complain.”

“And I am to do it,—to my absolute ruin, and to your great injury?”

“I think I could almost do it myself.” And Lizzie raised her hand as though there were some weapon in it. “But, Frank, there must be something. You wouldn’t have me sit down and bear it. All the world has been told of the engagement. There must be some punishment.”

“You would not wish to have an action brought,—for breach of promise?”

“I would wish to do whatever would hurt him most,—without hurting myself,” said Lizzie.

“You won’t give up the necklace?” said Frank.

“Certainly not,” said Lizzie. “Give it up for his sake,—a man that I have always despised?”

“Then you had better let him go.”

“I will not let him go. What,—to be pointed at as the woman that Lord Fawn had jilted? Never!”

A little later in the interchange Trollope interjects an authorial comment that applies only too well to Trump:

“And there is to be no punishment?” she asked, with that strong indignation at injustice which the unjust always feel when they are injured.

When Frank recommends patience, he has no more luck than all those who have recommended moderation to Trump. Lizzy itches for retribution:

“If you carry yourself well,—quietly and with dignity,—the world will punish him.”

“I don’t believe a bit of it. I am not a Patient Grizel who can content myself with heaping benefits on those who injure me, and then thinking that they are coals of fire…. I’ll tell him to his face what he is. I’ll lead him such a life that he shall be sick of the very name of necklace.”

“You cannot ask him to marry you.”

“I will. What, not ask a man to keep his promise when you are engaged to him? I am not going to be such a girl as that.”

“Do you love him, then?”

“Love him! I hate him. I always despised him, and now I hate him.”

“And yet you would marry him?”

“Not for worlds, Frank…. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. He shall ask me again. In spite of those idiots at Richmond he shall kneel at my feet,—necklace or no necklace; and then,—then I’ll tell him what I think of him. Marry him! I would not touch him with a pair of tongs.”

Lizzy has as many reasons for keeping the necklace as Trump gives for keeping the documents. Trump tells us that the documents are his because he was president and that a president can declassify documents in his mind and that the Department of Justice has a double standard in that everyone else took documents while only he is being attacked (all untrue). Lizzy, meanwhile, says that to take the necklace from her would dishonor her husband’s wish and (showing maternal solicitude for the first time in the book) would rob their son of his inheritance.

In both cases, money plays a role, although it’s still unclear how in Trump’s case. We don’t yet know whether the $2 billion his son-in-law received from the Saudis or their decision to hold high-profile golf tournaments at Trump courses had anything to do with the secret Iran attack plans that the former president absconded with. It’s certainly possible that he sees money to be made in the stolen documents.

The Eustace family lawyer, meanwhile, is terrified that Lizzy will break up the necklace and sell the diamonds. After all, despite the generous provisions in her husband’s will, she is beginning to run into debt. He doesn’t trust that she will in fact preserve the necklace for her son (which would solve the problem by keeping the diamonds in the family).

Lizzy’s behavior provides insight into Trump in that narcissism is a strong enough motivator for both.  If others deny them what they think they want, they feel that they are nothing—that their identities have been erased—and so will sacrifice everything to achieve their ends. There’s seldom any long-term planning or strategic thinking in their burn-it-all-down obsession. As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus puts it, Trump can be partly explained as an “eternal toddler”:

He wants what he wants. The papers are his toys, and he will not give them back. “I don’t want anybody looking,” Trump is quoted as telling his lawyer, in the lawyer’s damning memo-to-self. “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t.” My boxes. Mine, mine, mine.

Everyone agrees that the whole issue would have gone away if Trump had simply returned the papers, just as Lizzy can get married if she returns the necklace. But reason doesn’t hold much water with those who see their foundational identities under attack.

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