Trump’s Lean and Hungry Plotters

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2023
Cassius (Gielgud) and Brutus (Mason) plot Caesar’s assassination

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Friday

I see that my labeling Donald Trump a fascist this past week tracks fairly closely with yesterday’s Atlantic daily essay, written by political science professor and NeverTrumper Tom Nichols. Like me, Nichols was reluctant to apply the term until this past weekend. Then, in a Veterans Day speech, Trump “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism” with the following threat:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, 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, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

Rather than a red line, I see Trump crossing the Rubicon, so get ready for a discussion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

First, here’s some more from Nichols. In the past, he says, he warned his classes against the indiscriminate use of fascism. That’s because, he explains,

I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

This is what he was watching out for. Nor is it only the word “vermin” or Trump’s description of immigrants as “disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country'” that has Nichols concerned. It’s also “the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office.” These changes include

establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Now, Nichols is also urging us not to panic. Careful political scientist that he is, he points out that we’re in a better place than were Germany and Italy when fascists there came to power:

[A]lthough he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. 

Still, we can’t be complacent, as Shakespeare’s play teaches us. I’m particularly concerned when I revisit Brutus’s famous speech green-lighting the assassination of Caesar:

[W]e have tried the utmost of our friends,
 Our legions are brim full, our cause is ripe.
 The enemy increaseth every day;
 We, at the height, are ready to decline.
 There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
 Omitted, all the voyage of their life
 Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
 On such a full sea are we now afloat,
 And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.

Nichols doesn’t mention that there are Brutuses out there who think this is their last shot at taking over America. People like Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Stephen Miller see themselves “at the height” and “ready to decline.” They are at the height in that Trump (according to polling) leads Biden in a number of the critical swing states, but they also see themselves “ready to decline.” Trump, after all, is getting old, may be facing jail time, and shows signs of mental stress. He certainly won’t make it to 2028.

In other words, they see themselves on “a full sea.” Either they take “the current when it serves” or they forever lose their ventures.

Brutus and Cassius, to save the Roman republic, choose the assassination route. Bannon et. al. are planning modern day equivalents. After all, look at everything they attempted their first coup attempt: going to court over fraudulent claims of voter fraud, pressuring electors, stealing voter data, pressuring Mike Pence, and finally unleashing shock troops on the U.S. Capitol. And while they didn’t achieve their end that day, they scared a number of senators that would otherwise have voted to convict Trump of insurrection. In Mitt Romney’s biography we hear of legislators who didn’t vote against the former president because they were afraid his supporters would come after them and their families.

Many commentators have warned that the failed January 6 coup was a rehearsal, just as the beer hall putsch was for Hitler, and that the Trump plotters will hold nothing back this second time. In next year’s election, I expect we will see things we’ve never seen before in American elections—shock troops sent to intimidate voters from going to the polls in every heavily populated Democratic districts; election officials in those same districts threatened if they don’t produce pro-Trump results; GOP legislators, attorneys general, and local authorities brought into the process to disenfranchise voters (we already saw that happen on a small scale in Virginia’s 2023 election); X, Fox, and other rightwing media and social media outlets unleashed on the country in ways never before seen; Russian and rightwing billionaire money overwhelming the system; and so on.

If Biden were to be returned to office, these Trumpists already think that “the voyage of their life” will be “bound in shallows and in miseries.” As they see it, they have nothing to lose from extreme tactics.

Of course, our situation is the reverse of what occurs in the play. Rather than safeguard our republic from one-man rule, our conspirators want to establish Trump as Caesar. It is multicultural democracy that they want to stab.

 Although Democrats and the FBI were caught off guard by January 6, they now have a clear view of the lengths to which Trump and his followers will go to seize power. Will they heed those warnings as Caesar in Shakespeare’s play does not? Julius may have an inkling of what Cassius is willing to do—”Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look”—but he is unwilling to appear a coward. As he memorably observes,

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
 Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
 It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
 Seeing that death, a necessary end,
 Will come when it will come.

Unfortunately for him, his death comes far earlier than it should. Pray that does not happen in our case.

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My Brilliant Friend, Cure for Loneliness?

By Robin Bates | Published: November 15, 2023
Lila (Nasti) and Elena (Del Genio) in My Brilliant Friend

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Thursday

Here’s my weekly update on my incursions into Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. The book, which looks at different literary techniques as inventions created by authors to address major life issues, often surprises, which is one of its virtues. I was, for instance, surprised that a work I recently read and enjoyed—Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend—invented a remedy for loneliness. Or so Fletcher claims.

Although he frequently wanders in his book, Fletcher takes a particularly roundabout way with this claim. He starts with the story of Orpheus, moves to the operas L’Euridice and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, shifts to the bestselling penny dreadfuls of the Victorian era (pulp publications that offered up weekly serial installments of “long romantic sagas, supernatural horror tales, and true crime adventures”), and then it’s on to Varney the Vampire and Sweeney Todd (both originally penny dreadfuls), Mario Puzo’s Godfather (the penny dreadful on a grand scale), and finally Brilliant Friend.

I won’t get into what he says about Monteverdi and opera in general—something about presenting us with discord and then winning our deep friendship through harmonic resolutions—but one can certainly see that dynamic at work in the cliffhangers that sold for a penny in the 19th century.

The example Fletcher uses from The Godfather, which occurs early in the novel, is the undertaker whose daughter is savaged and who goes to Don Corleone for justice. The godfather wins our friendship by giving justice where the courts fail.

And yes, that’s the effect I remember the book having on me. Fletcher comments, “[I]n real life, it might be best to avoid the company of gangsters. But not in fiction. In fiction, the don’s friendship is healthy for our brain.”

Then he explains how:

The first healthy thing about befriending The Godfather is that it wards off loneliness.

After going into all the negative physiological consequences of loneliness, Fletcher explains how books can help. As I read Fletcher’s chapter, I thought of Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep, whose central idea is that we should look upon books as friends, with all the benefits and risks that friendship entails. Here’s Fletcher:

When we connect with a book, we can ease that feeling of aloneness. Even though no one is physically with us, our emotional connection to the narrator’s voice or to the lives of the story characters makes our brain feel like we’re in friendly company, easing the psychological gnaw that contributes to abnormal cortisol. And with pulp fiction, gaining this bonding benefit from literature is easy. The libraries of the world are packed with adventure novels, detective fictions, and romance paperbacks that deftly use the Partial Dopamine to connect with our brain, tiding us over until our flesh-and-blood friends come knocking.

So what’s so innovative about Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a novel about two working class girls growing up in 1950s Naples? If it is “more powerful than even the Godfather himself,” Fletcher writes, it’s because it gives us an opera through the eyes of a child. Noting that our most powerful friendships usually start in childhood, Fletcher says that My Brilliant Friend catches up “our whole psychology,” “from wonder, to curiosity, to jealousy.”

“To capture this all-consuming experience,” Fletcher continues on, “My Brilliant Friend

treats the relationship between Elena and Lila as a kind of pulp fiction serial: “It was time to go home, but we delayed, challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage.” Like an issue of Spicy Mystery or Terror Tales, Elena and Lila agitate each other’s heart. Immersing themselves in half-released dopamine, they form an ever-hungry bond that connects Elena and Lila for life; even their lovers and their families fall away.”

And:

Roughing up our emotions, like the two girls do to each other, the novel makes us feel part of their childhood gang.

Fletcher sums up Ferrante’s literary invention as follows:

To draw us into the same hungry friendship as Elena and Lila, Ferrante’s novel dishes up a simple recipe: pulp fiction dissonance from the perspective of a child. The pulp fiction dissonance does its usual work of priming our dopamine neurons. Meanwhile, the childhood perspective increases the intensity and emotional range of the dissonance, making our dopamine bond to the novel feel deeper and more psychologically complete.

Fletcher’s book title–Wonderworks–sums up well his feelings about literature. There’s a perpetual “oh, wow!” in his writing. Sometimes his enthusiasm attempts to carry him through reservations we might have. For instance, I can think of other child narrators previous to Ferrante’s that pull us into similarly deep friendships.

Jane Eyre, for instance, and the narrator of John Knowles’s A Separate Peace come to mind. To be sure, their mood swings aren’t as wild as those experienced by Elena and Lila, but maybe that’s as much to do with national temperament as a new literary invention.

 Then again, Brits can go through volatile mood swings—witness Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. And for that matter 12-year-old Juliet and 14-year-old Romeo.

But yes, this still feels a little different. So maybe Fletcher is on to something with his “pulp fiction dissonance from the perspective of a child.”

Whether My Brilliant Friend has brought a new literary technique into the world or not, Fletcher alerted me to structural aspects of the novel that I had missed and that I missed in The Godfather as well. It’s always good when an essay gives you a new perspective on a work.

And yes, if I had been lonely as I was reading it, it would have made me feel less lonely.

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Swift Understood Trumpian Fascism

By Robin Bates | Published: November 14, 2023
Sawrey Gilpin, Gulliver Taking Leave of the Houyhnhnms (Note: the boat in the background is fashioned out of human flesh.)

Wednesday

Like many people, I have been reluctant to apply the term “fascist” to Donald Trump—”authoritarian” or even “semi-fascist” has seemed less hysterical—but his speech this past weekend has removed any remaining doubts. It also puts me in mind of the most chilling parts of Gulliver’s Travels. More on that in a moment.

In his New Hampshire Veterans Day speech, as you’ve probably heard, Trump pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of our leading experts on fascism, explains the speech’s significance. First, as she points out, Trump appears to be deliberately channeling Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. ]Hitler in a 1920 speech referred to jews as “the black parasites of the nation” while Mussolini would joke about “rodents who carry infectious diseases from the East: the East that brings us lovely things, such as yellow fever and Bolshevism.”

Drawing on her knowledge of Italian and German fascism, Ben-Ghiat says that the purpose for such characterizations is to “get people to lose their aversion to violence.” In fact, Trump would like to “re-educate Americans to see violence as justified, patriotic, and even morally righteous.

His followers are falling into line. When pressed on the vermin speech, Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said of those making Trump-Hitler comparisons that “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” And as Trump talks about undocumented immigrants “polluting the blood of our country,” his 2025 advance team is circulating ideas about deporting millions of immigrants and “quarantining” others in massive camps. Trump even sounds proud of having taken children away from their parents.

So how does Jonathan Swift fit into all of this? In Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, the 18th century satirist appears to be making Ben-Ghiat’s point that, once people have been sufficiently dehumanized, all kinds of atrocities become possible.

For instance, Gulliver finds reasonable the question that arises in a Houyhnhnm council meeting about “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?” Gulliver agrees with “one of the members for the affirmative,” whom he says “offered several arguments of great strength and weight, alleging, ‘that as the Yahoos were the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced, so they were the most restive and indocible, mischievous and malicious…’”

Gulliver would like the horses to exempt himself, of course, and is crushed when they lump him together with all the rest. Other than that, however, he has no problem with the Houyhnhnms calling in exterminators.

And now for the ghastly part. In moves that anticipate those Nazi concentration camps where Jews were turned into soap, mattress stuffing, and lamp shades, Gulliver uses humans for shoe leather:

I soled my shoes with wood, which I cut from a tree, and fitted to the upper-leather; and when this was worn out, I supplied it with the skins of Yahoos dried in the sun.

And then there is his boat, which is also made of human skin, as are the sails. These latter, needing to be more supple, require the skin of children:

I finished a sort of Indian canoe, but much larger, covering it with the skins of Yahoos, well stitched together with hempen threads of my own making. My sail was likewise composed of the skins of the same animal; but I made use of the youngest I could get, the older being too tough and thick…

Finally, he stops all the chinks with human fat:

I tried my canoe in a large pond, near my master’s house, and then corrected in it what was amiss; stopping all the chinks with Yahoos’ tallow, till I found it staunch, and able to bear me and my freight…

What is chilling about these passages is how matter of fact they are. In fact, readers might not notice the details, which makes Ben-Ghiat’s point. It’s as if anything can be normalized.

The more we close in on such a reality, the more accurate it will be to call Trump a fascist.

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Biden Is No Beowulf–And That’s Okay

By Robin Bates | Published: November 13, 2023

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Tuesday

An interesting interchange I had with reader Dennis Johnson about last week’s Biden-as Hrothgar post last week has me thinking further what Americans want in a leader. While in my view Biden is doing everything we should want in a president—I consider him one of the great presidents in my lifetime—I acknowledge in my essay that he doesn’t inspire those who require inspiring. “Build back better” has never had the force of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the 21st century, Barack Obama’s “hope and change” (and “Yes, we can!”) and Donald Trump’s “Make America great again.”

As Beowulf can function as a leadership workshop, I think that how he addresses his troops provides some insight into why Democrats and Independents aren’t more excited by the president. For all his strengths, he is no Beowulf.

Early in the poem, Beowulf has had the challenging task of persuading a group of young Geat warriors to travel with him to Denmark to take on Grendel, who is ravaging the great hall of Heorot. In addition to inspiring his men, Beowulf also has to impress Hrothgar. It’s a little like someone from, say, Jamaica striding into the White House and proclaiming, “I hear you have a troll problem. I’m here to solve it.” Here’s his opening boast:

So every elder and experience councilman
Among my people supported my resolve
To come here to you, King Hrothgar,
Because all knew of my awesome strength.
They had seen me boltered in the blood of enemies
When I battled and bound five beasts,
Raided a troll-nest and in the night-sea
Slaughtered sea-brutes. I have suffered extremes
And avenged the Geats (their enemies brought it
Upon themselves, I devastated them).
Now I mean to be a match for Grendel,
Settle the outcome in a single combat.

Predictably, not everyone in King Hrothgar’s court is going embraces this young upstart. But when the contentious Unferth challenges him, Beowulf more than holds his own. Note his strategic use of contempt, followed by claims reminiscent of Muhammad Ali’s predictions of victory:

Now, I cannot recall any fight you entered, Unferth,
That bears comparison. I don’t boast when I say
That neither you nor Breca ever were much
Celebrated for swordsmanship
Or for facing danger in the battlefield.
You killed your own kith and kin,
So for all your cleverness and quick tongue,
You will suffer damnation in the pits of hell.
The fact is, Unferth, if you were truly
As keen or courageous as you claim to be
Grendel would never have got away with
Such unchecked atrocity, attacks on your king,
Havoc in Heorot and horrors everywhere.
But he knows he need never be in dread
Of your blade making a mizzle of his blood
Or of vengeance arriving ever from this quarter—
From the Victory-Shieldings, the shoulderers of the spear.
He knows he can trample down you Danes
To his heart’s content, humiliate and murder  
Without fear of reprisal. But he will find me different.
I will show him how Geats shape to kill
In the heat of battle. Then whoever wants to
May go bravely to morning mead, when morning light,
Scarfed in sun-dazzle, shines forth from the south
And brings another daybreak to the world.”

In the 2007 animated version of Beowulf, we see the hero’s companions rolling their eyes at their leader’s over-the-top speeches, but I think this is wrong. When you are going to risk your life for someone, you want him to be confident. King Hrothgar is certainly impressed, feeling the kind of hope that many felt when Barack Obama was elected:

Then the gray-haired treasure-giver was glad;
Far-famed in battle, the prince of Bright-Danes
And keeper of his people counted on Beowulf,
On the warrior’s steadfastness and his word.
So the laughter started, the din got louder
And the crowd was happy…

As Biden’s style is not Beowulf’s, the din tends not to get louder when he speaks.

The problem with promising hope and change, of course, is that disappointment is bound to follow, as it does the following night when Grendel’s Mother attacks. As I noted in last week’s post, Hrothgar is plunged into deep depression, lamenting, “Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned.” Beowulf’s response is to give him a pep talk:

Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, spoke:
“Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better
To avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
Means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
Win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
That will be his best and only bulwark.
So arise, my lord, and let us immediately
Set forth on the trail of this troll-dam.
I guarantee you: she will not get away,
Not to dens underground nor upland groves
Nor the ocean floor. She’ll have nowhere to flee to.
Endure your troubles today. Bear up
And be the man I expect you to be.”

Although it’s a bit unsettling to see Beowulf taking on the king’s role, that’s the job of a leader: when tragedy strikes, one must buoy up one’s people. Obama was very good at this, and Biden too has a gift for speaking to the victims of violence. Trump, on the other hand, was a disaster, whether in consoling widows or rallying the nation to confront Covid.

Beowulf’s words, it turns out, have their intended effect:

With that the old lord sprung to his feet
And praised God for Beowulf’s pledge.
Then a bit and halter were brought for his horse
With the plaited mane. The wise king mounted
The royal saddle and rode out in style
With a force of shield-bearers.

Beowulf is less effective at the end of his life, and it’s worth examining his final speech to his people to figure out why. The poem grapples throughout with the problem of dragon kings, who are rulers who have lost the ability to lead. Some succumb to depression or sadness, some to paranoia. As I read Beowulf’s dragon episode, the hero is in danger of becoming one of these kings. Part of the problem is that, looking back over his life, everything seems meaningless. All he can see is one damn death after another, with no end in sight.

His speech about the dragon disempowers his men. Essentially he tells them that only he can take on the monster. Or as Trump puts it, “Only I can fix it”:

Men at arms, remain here on the barrow,
Safe in your armor, to see which one of us
Is better in the end at bearing wounds
In a deadly fray. This fight is not yours,
Nor is it up to any man except me
To measure his strength against the monster
Or to prove his worth. I shall win the gold
By my courage, or else mortal combat,
Doom of battle, will bear your lord away.”

The result of such leadership is the men turning and running when the fight goes bad:

[H]e who had once ruled
Was furled in fire and had to face the worst.
No help or backing was to be had then
From his high-born comrades; that hand-picked troop
Broke ranks and ran for their lives
To the safety of the wood.

At this point, Wiglaf proposes a different response to hardship, one that involves working together rather than separately:

[N]ow the day has come

When this lord we serve needs sound men
To give him their support. Let us go to him,
Help our leader through the hot flame
And dread of the fire. As God is my witness,
I would rather my body were robbed in the same
Burning blaze as my gold-giver’s body
Than go back home bearing arms.
That is unthinkable, unless we have first
Slain the foe and defended the life
Of the prince of the Weather-Geats. I well know
That things he has done for us deserve better.
Should he alone be left exposed
To fall in battle? We must bond together,
Shield and helmet, mail-shirt and sword.

Bottom-up leadership is replacing top-down leadership, and it proves more effective. When Wiglaf goes to the aid of Beowulf, the tide turns. First Wiglaf shouts encouragement to his king:

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.

Then, together, they kill the dragon:

They had killed the enemy, courage quelled his life;
That pair of kinsmen, partners in nobility,
Had destroyed the foe. So every man should act,
Be at hand when needed…

I don’t know whether Biden’s quiet and cooperative leadership style is guaranteed to get him re-elected, but I know that it gets things done. His cabinet secretaries, who are “at hand when needed,” have been amazingly effective at addressing the needs of the country. Like Wiglaf, they know that working together with their leader is the best way of solving problems. What is seen by many as Biden’s weakness—the lack of a forceful personality—is Biden’s secret strength: he knows how to get people to sacrifice ego for the good of the whole.

So the president resembles Beowulf after all, at least in the way he gives life to his people. In Wiglaf’s words,

Anyone ready to admit the truth
Will surely realize the lord of men
Who showered you with gifts and gave you the armor
You are standing in–when he would distribute
Helmets and mail-shirts to men on the mead-benches,
A prince treating his thanes in hall
To the best he could find, far or near…

If we are do not come to his support, we can expect the future that Wiglaf predicts for the Geats:

Every one of you
With freeholds of land, our whole nation,
Will be dispossessed, once princes from beyond
Get tidings of how you turned and fled
And disgraced yourselves.

In short, if you think you can fight for our democracy only if you are inspired by the president, you have already lost the battle. Or as Wiglaf puts it, you are “throwing weapons uselessly away.”

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A Vet Sees Himself in Odysseus

By Robin Bates | Published: November 12, 2023
Pellegrino Tibaldi, The Blinding of the Cyclops

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Monday

Since Veterans Day occurred over the weekend, I’m only now honoring the occasion, posting a poem that I really like about how literature came to the aid of one former soldier. In Amorak Huey’s “We Were All Odysseus in Those Days,” a man who survives a battle in which a friend dies looks to Homer to support him in his subsequent life.

The tale of Odysseus and Polyphemus is one that involves violence, tragedy, ingenuity, and trickery. Trapped by the Cyclops in his cave, Odysseus must watch as four of his men are devoured before his eyes.

I remember being haunted by the passage when I encountered it in high school. Here’s the scene in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation:

Neither reply nor pity came from him,
but in one stride he clutched at my companions
and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies
to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.
Then he dismembered them and made his meal,
gaping and crunching like a mountain lion—
everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones.

I think of how a veteran who has watched a companion die in battle would relate to such a passage.

For Odysseus to escape with his remaining men requires “buying time and making do,” as Huey’s poem puts it. Odysseus’s first move involves what Huey calls a bad pun, made after he has plied Polyphemus with some potent wine:

                                                     “Cyclops,
you ask my honorable name? Remember
the gift you promised me, and I shall tell you.
My name is Nohbdy: mother, father, and friends,
everyone calls me Nohbdy.’
                                                        And he said:
“Nohbdy’s my meat, then, after I eat his friends.
Others come first. There’s a noble gift, now.”
Even as he spoke, he reeled and tumbled back…

Knowing that he and his men cannot move the stone blocking the cave, Odysseus chooses to blind rather than kill Polyphemus. The men then escape by clinging to the undersides of Polyphemus’s sheep as he takes them to pasture the following day. The cleverness of Odysseus’s bad pun becomes clear when Polyphemus attempts to rally the other Cyclopes to his aid: “Nohbdy has blinded me,” he tells them. Here’s the poem:

We Were All Odysseus in Those Days
By Amorak Huey

A young man learns to shoot
& dies in the mud
an ocean away from home,
a rifle in his fingers
& the sky dripping
from his heart. Next to him
a friend watches
his final breath slip
ragged into the ditch,
a thing the friend will carry
back to America—
wound, souvenir,
backstory. He’ll teach
literature to young people
for 40 years. He’ll coach
his daughters’ softball teams.
Root for Red Wings
& Lions & Tigers. Dance
well. Love generously.
He’ll be quick with a joke
& firm with handshakes.
He’ll rarely talk
about the war. If asked
he’ll tell you instead
his favorite story:
Odysseus escaping
from the Cyclops
with a bad pun & good wine
& a sharp stick.
It’s about buying time
& making do, he’ll say.
It’s about doing what it takes
to get home, & you see
he has been talking
about the war all along.
We all want the same thing
from this world:
Call me nobody. Let me live.

This English teacher and veteran will use Odysseus’s escape from death to stand in for his own experience. It’s a way to distance himself from the horrors he has witnessed, even as it simultaneously acknowledges those horrors. He, like Odysseus, has been on an epic quest and he, like Odysseus, has survived. Now he can live quietly–Call me nobody. Let me live–as he raises a family and gives back to his community.

While my own vet father didn’t directly witness fellow soldiers getting killed, he lost friends in World War II and also witnessed the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp three days after it was liberated. He too believed deeply in contributing to his community, getting me to wonder if there’s something about those who have been in war to commit themselves to a community of life. Not all veterans, to be sure, but many of them.

I think of the scene in Saving Private Ryan where the Tom Hanks character, after in fact saving Ryan at the cost of his own life, tells him before dying, “Earn this. Earn it.” And of Ryan, decades later, saying to his commander’s grave marker,

Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I’ve tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.

When he turns to his wife and says to her, “Tell me I’ve led a good life. Tell me I’m a good man,” she replies—and one knows she speaks the truth—“You are.”

The veterans I have known were and are good men and women. To them I say belatedly, “Happy Veterans Day.”

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Dante’s Version of Heaven on Earth

By Robin Bates | Published: November 11, 2023
Dante’s Heaven of the Sun

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Sunday

Today’s Old Testament reading, which is from The Book of Wisdom (a.k.a. The Wisdom of Solomon), works as a poem in its own right. It also brings to mind the discourse that Dante has with Solomon in Paradiso. Here’s the reading:

Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate
To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought.

Wisdom here is not just being smart but being willing to submit our lives to God, who in turn gives us the gifts we need to have rich and spirit-filled lives. The gifts differ from person to person, of course. Solomon, for instance, asked God for wisdom to be able to govern Israel and administer justice. I have always prayed to be a good teacher, with the literature I teach nurturing, guiding and embiggening (Lisa Simpson’s word) my students. It’s always a good exercise to identify our gifts and determine the best ways to share them with the world.

When Dante speaks of wisdom, he adds another component, which is opening ourselves to God’s love. In Paradiso’s final line, Dante speaks of the love that “moves the sun and the other stars,” and this love is so powerful that Dante, upon first entering Paradiso, cannot look directly at it. This fact leads to questions that he directs to Solomon, who resides in the sphere of the Sun.

When we reassume corporeal form on the last day, Dante asks Solomon how we will be strong enough to look upon that love that we commune directly with in heaven.

I’ll explain in a moment why this is an important question, even if you don’t believe that all will rise again in some mystical end time. Let’s first look at how Solomon responds.

It all depends on how humans interact with God’s love, Solomon tells Dante. The more one is able to open oneself to divinity, the brighter one shines. As the prophet king explains it, “the soul’s brightness takes its measure from our ardor,/our ardor from our vision.”

So instead of being overwhelmed by the light of God’s love when we return to earth, we will, as more perfect beings (now that we are rejoined with our bodies), be able to open ourselves to God’s love more fully than we did in our previous lives:

When, glorified and sanctified, the flesh
is once again our dress, our persons shall,
in being all complete, please all the more . . .

And

[T]herefore, whatever light gratuitous
the Highest Good gives us will be enhanced—
the light that will allow us to see Him;

that light will cause our vision to increase,
the ardor vision kindles to increase,
the brightness born of ardor to increase. 

In short, we will be able to love more perfectly. In a rather extraordinary vision, Dante shows all the heavenly host longing to be reunited with their earthly bodies, when they can interact again with those they loved on earth: 

One and the other choir seemed to me
so quick and keen to say “Amen” that they
showed clearly how they longed for their dead bodies—

not only for themselves, perhaps, but for
their mothers, fathers, and for others dear
to them before they were eternal flames. 

Dante even goes so far as to say that the flesh that we will regain will overpower the effulgence—the bright light—that surrounds the celestial spirits. It will do so in the same way that the light from a burning lump of coal overpowers the coal itself: 

But even as a coal that sends forth flame,
  And by its vivid whiteness overpowers it
  So that its own appearance it maintains,

Thus the effulgence that surrounds us now
  Shall be o’erpowered in aspect by the flesh,
  Which still to-day the earth doth cover up…

 I think of Robert Frost’s line in “Birches,” “Earth’s the right place for love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” 

I wrote last week about how the early Christian church imagined Paradise occurring on earth, not in some ethereal future, and one can see Dante thinking along these lines as well. Just as one can read Inferno as being more about the hell that we make for ourselves in this world than in the next, I think the same can be said of Paradiso: the more we open ourselves to God’s love, the brighter we will shine and the more we bring God’s kingdom to earth. Or as the Lord’s Prayer’s puts it, “on earth as it is in heaven.” 

The 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan puts it this way in his poem “The World.” (The “fools” he mentions are those who is lose themselves in their own ego-driven desires.):

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.

In past posts about Inferno I’ve compared Dante’s damned souls with Vaughan’s account of those who make their own hells here and now. For instance,

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves…

So Solomon, in his wisdom, suggests we choose love of God over love of Self. We could tread the sun if we wanted, outshining Dante’s celestial flames. Why do we so often settle for darkness instead?

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Imagining Trump as Kafka’s K.

By Robin Bates | Published: November 9, 2023

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Friday

Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri has once again hit paydirt by imagining Donald Trump as the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial. While Trump himself, being a non-reader, would not describe his experiences as Kafkaesque, some of his more literate supporters might.

Of course, the big difference is that K. never discovers what he’s been accused of—that’s what makes the novel so nightmarish—whereas the Trump indictments are clearly spelled out: he stole documents, he defrauded banks, he attempted to overthrow the government, he slimed a woman that he raped. Petri pulls off her satire, however, by showing the whole trial through Trump’s eyes. From that vantage point, Trump is just as confused as K.

In The Trial, K. never finds a firm place on which to stand. It all starts with his arrest:

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. Every day at eight in the morning he was brought his breakfast by Mrs. Grubach’s cook—Mrs. Grubach was his landlady—but today she didn’t come. That had never happened before.

Then there’s this interchange with the arresting officers:

“And why am I under arrest?” he then asked. “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.”

Later, when he shows up to court, he’s never clear what exactly is happening. The courtroom itself is hard to find and then, when he enters, he’s not sure what anyone’s role is:

At the other end of the hall where K. had been led there was a little table set at an angle on a very low podium which was as overcrowded as everywhere else, and behind the table, near the edge of the podium, sat a small, fat, wheezing man who was talking with someone behind him. This second man was standing with his legs crossed and his elbows on the backrest of the chair, provoking much laughter. From time to time he threw his arm in the air as if doing a caricature of someone. The youth who was leading K. had some difficulty in reporting to the man. He had already tried twice to tell him something, standing on tiptoe, but without getting the man’s attention as he sat there above him. It was only when one of the people up on the podium drew his attention to the youth that the man turned to him and leant down to hear what it was he quietly said.

And then there’s the judge:

[K.] stood pressed closely against the table, the press of the crowd behind him was so great that he had to press back against it if he did not want to push the judge’s desk down off the podium and perhaps the judge along with it.

The judge, however, paid no attention to that but sat very comfortably on his chair and, after saying a few words to close his discussion with the man behind him, reached for a little notebook, the only item on his desk. It was like an old school exercise book and had become quite misshapen from much thumbing. “Now then,” said the judge, thumbing through the book. He turned to K. with the tone of someone who knows his facts and said, “you are a house painter?” “No,” said K., “I am the chief clerk in a large bank.” This reply was followed by laughter among the righthand faction down in the hall…

There is one final interaction with this judge at the end of the chapter when K. defiantly turns to go:

“One moment,” [the judge] said. K. stood where he was, but looked at the door with his hand already on its handle rather than at the judge. “I merely wanted to draw your attention,” said the judge, “to something you seem not yet to be aware of: today, you have robbed yourself of the advantages that a hearing of this sort always gives to someone who is under arrest.” K. laughed towards the door. “You bunch of louts,” he called, “you can keep all your hearings as a present from me,” then opened the door and hurried down the steps. Behind him, the noise of the assembly rose as it became lively once more and probably began to discuss these events as if making a scientific study of them.

K doesn’t manage to maintain this bravado for long, however, and starts obsessing about his situation. It so happens that he never sees the judge again although he searches for him. He also seeks to learn about his legal situation from a lawyer, who never gives him a straight answer. In the end, the only certainty that K. finds is his own death.

Petri begins her piece by riffing on Kafka’s first line:

Someone must have been telling lies about Donald T. because he had done nothing wrong and yet he kept having to be on trial. He was on trail everywhere at once.

No, T. could think of no possible reason this would be happening to him. It was Kafkaesque! He had simply been going about his business like any other man, inflating his assets, demanding more votes to keep him in power, stockpiling classified documents in his bathroom — and now this strange thing was happening.

We soon learn the reasons for T.’s confusion: he thinks he’s at a rally:

T. knew that something was unusual when he arrived at his campaign rally. From the very first moment it struck him as an odd place for a rally. It was inside a Manhattan curtroom. His children had spoken, which was typical for a rally, but their remarks had been strangely confined to their business dealings. Instead of saying how great he was and how wonderful he was going to make America, they had said things about negotiations and used the word “boilerplate.”

In Kafka’s courtroom scene, K. tries explaining that a mistake has been made, only to be confused by the responses. Petri has the same situation play out with T.:

T. thought it best to deliver his rally speech as usual. He would certainly not be the one to admit that something was out of the ordinary. He would tell them about his hatred of windmills (“I’m not a windmill person” and how much he esteemed Mar-a-Lago, a place of incalculable value because it was the most beautiful spot in the world. He would tell them how he would be the next president, though perhaps it would be better not to elaborate on his plans to get vengeance right away. He would rail about witch hunts and judges. He started off quite strongly, but as he went on, he began to feel ill at ease. It was strange to speak like this without his cheering audience, with just the man sitting there at the desk growing visibly irritated.

Unlike Kafka, however, Petri actually shows straight answers being given to the defendant:

And this was not his only rally held in a tiny courtroom. He had to keep appearing in these places. He was on trial everywhere, all the time, and no one could tell him why. “That’s not true,” somebody said. “Everyone has been telling you why constantly. You are on trial in the state of New York for business fraud. You are on trial in Florida for your mishandling of classified documents. And you are on trial in Georgia for trying to overturn the election.”

Because he’s living in his own bubble, however, T. cannot hear what people are saying:

No, he could not understand it. He would simply refuse to understand it, and see what would happen then.

What happens then in The Trial is that K. K. is murdered by two state thugs. While we don’t want that for Trump, we do want some accountability.

Interestingly, for all people’s complaining about living in a Kafkaesque world, Trump is currently in court because America is not the society we see in The Trial. The court system is following a set of clearly set out rules so that everyone knows where they are at all times. For that matter, our electoral system keeps on reflecting the will of the voters, and our institutions of law enforcement, in the main, continue to work. And the mainstream media gets things mostly right.

If Trump gets his way, on the other hand, we really will have a Kafkaesque society where he can hound people who have done nothing wrong and twist the law to suit his own ends. Although The Trial was written in 1914-15, it resembles the world of Josef Stalin or Vladimir Putin, which we know is Trump’s dream. Increasingly we’re hearing about plans to stuff the Justice Department and the Federal Government with Trump sycophants should he regain the presidency.

The Republican House is already doing its part, seeking to impeach Joe Biden for reasons to be decided later. We’re not out of the woods yet.

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Brecht, Hitler’s Coup Attempt, and Jan. 6

By Robin Bates | Published: November 8, 2023
Nazis in Munich on November 9, 1923

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Thursday

Today is the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup that bears an unsettling resemblance to Donald Trump’s January 6 insurrection. Although Hitler was arrested and imprisoned for treason, his failed coup brought him to the public’s attention, and he was eventually able to turn that failure into spectacular success. Trump’s fascist followers like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are hoping that Trump can follow the same playbook.

In the 1923 coup attempt, 2000 Nazis marched on a Munich war memorial. Sixteen of them were killed, along with four policemen and one bystander. Hitler only spent nine months of his five-year sentence in jail (he used the time to write Mein Kampf) before being released, at which point he entered electoral politics. Which of course is what Trump did following his own coup attempt.

Playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht saw Hitler for what he really was from the very beginning. I think of his poem “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain” as I watch the mainstream media struggle with how to cover Trump: does it continue to remind us that he attempted to overthrow the government or does it cover this election like any other. Will it point out, relentlessly, that Trump plans to do what Hitler did upon ascending to power, which was suspend the German constitution and go after his enemies? Or will it treat Trump as any other GOP politician?

As in “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain,” the media would find its task easier if Trump were guilty of only one or two things. Then it could duly report the scandal and the public could raise its “cry of horror.” The New York Times found it easy to focus on Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal, even though in the end it came to nothing. But what does it do in the face of Trump’s outrageous lies and fraudulent real estate practices and money laundering and tax scams and Russian collusion and documents theft and dodgy businesses and dodgy charities and sexual assaults and racist behavior? What does it do when he is charged with 91 felony crimes, in addition to various civil crimes, and when he threatens judges, prosecutors, witnesses, etc.—and when people carry out his threats with threats of their own, and sometimes violence?

This is the situation Brecht describes in his poem. The one who brings the letter, the one who seeks to warn, the one asking for sympathetic attention, the one bleeding from wounds, and the one who finally reports to the authorities are all versions of people asking us to wake up to Hitler’s (and for us, to Trump’s) impending fascism.

And what is the effect of our cries? Brecht replies,

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”

Here’s the poem:

Like one who brings an important letter to the counter after office hours: the counter is already closed.
Like one who seeks to warn the city of an impending flood, but speaks another language.  They do not understand him.
Like a beggar who knocks for the fifth time at the door where he has four times been given something: the fifth time he is hungry.
Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor: his blood goes on flowing.
So do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

I get that people don’t want to think about the threat of fascism all the time. Brecht himself was aware of the toll such focus takes. In “A Bad Time for Poetry,” he says he’d rather be enthusiastic about “the blossoming apple tree,” but instead must write about “the housepainter’s speeches.” The housepainter, incidentally is Hitler, who as an artist painted pictures of houses.

A rhyme in my song
Would seem almost wanton.
 
Inside me contend
Enthusiasm at the blossoming apple tree
And horror at the housepainter’s speeches.
But only the latter
Drives me to write.

Perhaps the media can only express so much horror before we become inured to it, as we become inured to heavy rain. But the only thing it should never do, as the German media should never have done with Hitler, is describe Trump as anything other than a law-breaking insurrectionist and wannabe fascist dictator.

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Stream of Consciousness’ Healing Powers

By Robin Bates | Published: November 7, 2023
Virginia Woolf

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Wednesday

I’ve been reporting on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, and today turn to stream of consciousness. As the Ohio State Professor of Story Science explains it, this literary invention has brought relief to people suffering from “heightened cognitive reactivity,” which is what happens when our mind “overreacts to a wave of its cognitive stream.” Among such overreactions, Fletcher points to how a memory can send us into a panic, a slight can “pitch us into gloom,” and an idea can “dash us into stampeding thought.”

Heightened cognitive reactivity, he elaborates, is “a feature of mania, depression, post-traumatic stress, complicated grief and other psychiatric conditions.” It is also “a common result of stress, tiredness, overstimulation and other conditions of ordinary life.”

For healing help, he recommends turning to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

The chapter begins by looking at the revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology made by William James, the brother of Henry. James broke with the psychology of his day by noting that the mind flows like a river or a stream. As he put it,

Every definite image in the mind is stepped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echol of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.

Before James and even after, the common prescription for people suffering from nervous disorders (as they were called at the time) was rest. This applied to soldiers with PTSD and women suffering (like Woolf) from bipolar disorder. But James discovered, and Woolf agreed, that doing nothing actually made things worse. When such a remedy is tried on PTSD victim Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, he commits suicide by leaping out of a window.

Instead of telling people they shouldn’t read, James said they should find the right kind of reading. James himself

consumed a steady diet of books “favorable” to his own volition, and gradually he felt his dark emotions lift. By 1872, the relief was so complete that James declared his “soul sickness” gone.

The psychological conclusion is that we should cultivate some form of mindfulness, which helps us

feel a slight separation from our consciousness, as if we’re observing our own ideas from without. So instead of being dragged along by a rushing river of moods, memories and impressions, we stand free on the riverbank, watching our mental waves lap past.

Fletcher says that this feeling of psychological distance

reduces brain activity in emotion and memory-processing regions such as our cortical midline structures and insular cortex. And that reduction in turn lowers our cognitive reactivity, gentling the symptoms of even depression, mania, generalized anxiety, and posttraumatic stress.

Fletcher notes that different authors have different styles of stream of consciousness. Proust remains within a single consciousness while Joyce, without any warning, jumps between minds, often without providing the connections between thoughts so that one feels constantly jolted. (This is one reason Ulysses is so hard to read.) Like Proust, Woolf always shows us the the connections but, like Joyce, she doesn’t stay inside one mind but moves between multiple minds (four in Mrs. Dalloway).

To watch Fletcher’s theory in action, let’s start with a passage from Woolf’s novel. On the first page, Mrs. Dalloway has just decided to go out and buy flowers for herself:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.

Fletcher says that the style provides a therapeutic effect similar to mindfulness exercises:

As it guides us through the consciousnesses of character after character after character, it gradually attunes our brain to a great consciousness: the third-person perspective of the novel itself. That perspectives weaves us in and out of the minds of Clarissa, Scrope,Septimus, and all the rest, enabling us to simultaneously experience inside feelings and outside distance. The resulting blend of emotion perception and cognitive separation mimics the modern psychiatric treatment for heightened cognitive reactivity. Filling our consciousness with mental flow, yet reducing the neural activity of our cortical midline structures and insular cortex, it allows us to experience emotional torrents while remaining free of their undertow.

In this flow, we are conscious both of Clarissa Dalloway’s “shock of delight” and Septimus’s desperate suicidal thoughts, even while we are not shocked or desperate ourselves. As Fletcher succinctly sums up our situation,

We can know the river’s deepest currents while feeling calm upon the shore.

Fletcher recommends other novels as well, including one by Ian McEwan that I read recently:

Whenever you’d like more of that peace, you can find the innovations of Woolf and Proust in a wide range of modern fiction. If you’d like a sci-fi mystery, try Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. If yuou’d like a voyage through the mind of a neurosurgeon, try Ian McEwan’s Saturday. If you’d like a dip into sixties-style hallucinogenic paranoia, try Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. If you’d like a love story, try Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You.

As you turn the pages, he advises, “feel the war inside your nerves relax as the flow of rivers rushes past.”

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