Rising Anti-Semitism, So Call the Golem

By Robin Bates | Published: October 5, 2023
Reproduction of the Golem of Prague

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Friday

The Washington Post headline could not fail to catch the eye: “Antisemitism is rising. Time to summon a 10-foot-tall crisis monster.” The subject, as author Adam Mansbach explained, was The Golem of Prague, a giant figure from Jewish folklore who is created out of mud and clay and “animated through secret incantations to defend the Jewish people in times of crisis.” Mansbach says stories of the golem date back to the 1500s.

Reading Mansbach’s article brought to mind the handling of the Golem legend in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. More on that in a moment.

Mansbach’s interest in the Golem has been spurred by the increasing number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States:

I started writing about golems in the spring of 2022 —before Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving dominated the news cycle with antisemitic screeds and Holocaust denial — and finished my project the week former president Donald Trump had dinner with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. I’m writing this two months after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the coronavirus had been engineered to exempt Ashkenazi Jews; a month after audio transcripts filed in a Manhattan court revealed Rudy Giuliani mocking Jews for celebrating Passover and Robert G. Bowers was sentenced for killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the day Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for costing X, formerly known as Twitter, ad revenue by calling attention to rising hate speech on the platform.

In this list, Mansbach doesn’t mention Trump’s “good people on both sides” characterization of the Charlottesville marchers chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Or his recent Rosh Hashanah message, with its implied threat:

Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!

If the Golem looms so large in the Jewish collective imagination, it is because, Mansbach says, it

represents vigilance against the inevitable, cyclical return of injustice. His myth is born of an understanding that antisemitism is ineradicable — that as long as there are people who feel embittered about their lives, constrained by forces they cannot control, they will come to blame the Jews and then to enact violence upon us. 

Our contemporary challenge, Mansbach concludes, is for we ourselves to internalize golem vigilance:

In the absence of a giant clay superhero, our only choice is to become the golems we need. This doesn’t just mean physical confrontation, though there are times when that might be necessary. Nor does it consist simply of vigilance against Jew haters. Instead, it requires Jewish people to enlarge and modernize our watchfulness, to understand that every vehicle of hatred is built on a chassis of antisemitism, and that violence — in word or deed — against any marginalized group will always be a harbinger of tragedy for us.

Kavalier and Clay informs us that, whether we know it or not, we are familiar with the Golem. Superman, created in 1938 by a couple of Jewish artists (one of whose parents had fled Russian pogroms in 1900), inspired by this myth of a strongman saving the downtrodden. Chabon makes the link Jewish resistance and comic book characters even more explicit. It begins with the story of a Houdini-like figure spiriting a golem statue out of Prague before the Nazis find it. Chabon lets us in on some of the deliberations behind the decision.  Some want to keep the Golem in Prague since that’s where it has always been. In fact, there

were even a few in the circle who, when pressed, admitted that they did not want to send the Golem away because in their hearts they had not surrendered the childish hope that the great enemy of Jew-haters and blood libelers might one day, in a moment of dire need, be revived to fight again. In the end, however, the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place, preferably in a neutral nation that was out of the way and not entirely devoid of Jews.

The escape artist in charge of the transfer also uses the occasion to help one of his students, Josef Kavalier, to escape Czechslovakia. The Golem is transferred in a coffin, as though it is a corpse, with Kavalier hidden at one end. Through that means he crosses the border, takes the Siberian railway to Japan, and then finds his way to New York, where he connects with his cousin Samuel Klayman. As Kavalier is a gifted artist, the two invent a comic book series that proves to be wildly successful.

The protagonist of their comic book is “the Escape Artist,” who, Houdini-like, escapes all manner of confinements to make war on the Nazis while helping the innocent escape. On the cover of the first issue, Kavalier vents his frustration by showing the Escape Artist unloading a punch on Adolph Hitler. After that, Chabon writes,

it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense.

And:

It was Joe’s battle scenes—the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest—that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described  as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian. There is smoke, fire, and lightning. There are thick flocks of bombers, spiky flotillas of battleships, gardens of blooming shell bursts. Up in one corner, a bombed-out castle looms stark on a hill. Down in another corner, a grenade is exploding in a henhouse as chicken and eggs go flying, Messerschmitts dive, finned torpedoes plow up the surf. And somewhere in the middle of it all struggles the Escapist, lashed with naval chain to the business end of a prescient Axis rocket bomb.

At first, Sam’s boss worried that the direct references to Hitler and the Nazis is too political (America has not yet entered the war), but Kavalier and Clay insist on it, although they compromise a little. At first the Escapist and his company fight “the Razi elites of Zothenia, Gothsylvania, Draconia, and other pseudonymous dark bastions of the Iron Chain, 

arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured British airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of the evil dictator, Attila Hakoff, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war.

Chabon refers to the two comic book creators as “golem makers,” and their Golem does a version of what he’s supposed to do, which is to come to the rescue of European Jews. In its small way, the comic book character helps prepare Americans to embrace the war effort, which will culminate in ending the Final Solution. Chabon writes,

[Kavalier] wanted [their boss] to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.

Many of today’s comic book heroes, whether Batman or Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk—pretty much anyone with bulging muscles and a mission to defeat evil—can be traced back to the Golem of Prague. And yes, we need him now as much as ever.

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Poetic Incentives to Take Long Walks

By Robin Bates | Published: October 4, 2023
Vasily Polmenov, Woman Walking on Forest Trail

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Thursday

If you enjoy autumn strolls, check out the poetry of the 17th century Anglican cleric Thomas Traherne. My Faculty Reading Group, which has been discussing the work of such metaphysical poets as John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan, has introduced me to Traherne, who is perpetually enthusiastic about the gifts he sees in the world around him. Walking, as he sees it, is one of the best ways of experiencing them.

Traherne makes a distinction between seeing with the eyes and seeing with the mind. The first is merely mechanical and does not involve noticing things. When we walk in this manner, Traherne says, we are like “dead puppets” who “may move in the bright and glorious day, yet not behold the sky.”

In his extended essay on walking, Henry David Thoreau makes a similar distinction. For him, it is the difference between the body and the spirit:

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

Actually, Thoreau prefers the word “sauntering,” which accentuates the randomness of the experience.

Traherne agrees. When we walk, he says, we should think of ourselves as bees gathering pollen. Or as he sensuously puts it,

To fly abroad like active bees,
Among the hedges and the trees,
To cull the dew that lies
On ev’ry blade,
From ev’ry blossom; till we lade
Our minds, as they their thighs.

For a moment, Traherne sounds Wordsworthian, suggesting that we lose something as we grow older:

A little child these well perceives,
Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves,
May rich as kings be thought…

Wordsworth similarly observes (in Intimations of Immortality), “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory from the earth.”

Unlike Wordsworth, however, Traherne, then assures us that these pleasures are equally available to adults:

But there’s a sight
Which perfect manhood may delight,
To which we shall be brought.

Apparently this is a theme for Traherne. In fact, as we were informed by Sewanee’s Renaissance specialist James MacDonald, Traherne has one note, which he plays over and over. One sees his non-stop enthusiasm in “Wonder” as well as in “Walking.” Here are two stanzas:

The skies in their magnificence,
The lively, lovely air;
Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!
The stars did entertain my sense,
And all the works of God, so bright and pure,
So rich and great did seem,
As if they ever must endure
In my esteem.

A native health and innocence
Within my bones did grow,
And while my God did all his glories show,
I felt a vigour in my sense
That was all spirit. I within did flow
With seas of life, like wine;
I nothing in the world did know
But ’twas divine.

As one of our members put it, it’s like Blake’s Songs of Innocence without the accompanying Songs of Experience.

In this regard, Traherne differs from George Herbert, whom we had just discussed and who constantly grapples with mood swings and agonizing doubt. Although he, like Traherne often ends up with a deep appreciation of God’s bounty, he has to work harder to get there.

But if you want your walk to be unalloyed joy, Traherne is the poet for you.

Walking
By Thomas Traherne

To walk abroad is, not with eyes,
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;
Else may the silent feet,
Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good
Nor joy nor glory meet.

Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change,
But cannot see, though very strange
The glory that is by;
Dead puppets may
Move in the bright and glorious day,
Yet not behold the sky.

And are not men than they more blind,
Who having eyes yet never find
The bliss in which they move;
Like statues dead
They up and down are carried
Yet never see nor love.

To walk is by a thought to go;
To move in spirit to and fro;
To mind the good we see;
To taste the sweet;
Observing all the things we meet
How choice and rich they be.

To note the beauty of the day,
And golden fields of corn survey;
Admire each pretty flow’r
With its sweet smell;
To praise their Maker, and to tell
The marks of his great pow’r.

To fly abroad like active bees,
Among the hedges and the trees,
To cull the dew that lies
On ev’ry blade,
From ev’ry blossom; till we lade
Our minds, as they their thighs.

Observe those rich and glorious things,
The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs,
The fructifying sun;
To note from far
The rising of each twinkling star
For us his race to run.

A little child these well perceives,
Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves,
May rich as kings be thought,
But there’s a sight
Which perfect manhood may delight,
To which we shall be brought.

While in those pleasant paths we talk,
’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk;
For we may by degrees
Wisely proceed
Pleasures of love and praise to heed,
From viewing herbs and trees.

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Russia’s “Expendable” Invaders

By Robin Bates | Published: October 3, 2023

Wednesday

I recently discovered a news item that, while horrific, brought back fond memories of reading Brian Jacques’s Redwall books to my children. The memory involves the shrew characters.

The Redwall series could be described as a blend of Wind in the Willows and Lord of the Rings. In it, various animals—most notably mice (Martin the Warrior) but also (as in Kenneth Grahame’s novel) badgers, moles and otters. The villains are invariably (again as in Wind in the Willows), weasels and stoats, as well as foxes and rats. The good guys seek to defend Redwall Abbey from invasion and venture out to rescue captured comrades, all the while employing pre-gunpowder military technology.

But I want to talk about shrews, who are also in alliance with the good guys. They are headed by one Log-a-Log and they show up en masse, dozens upon dozens. Invariably, like actual shrews, they are fearless and go plunging into battle. They also suffer mass casualties. It’s not uncommon, say when they are aboard a boat, to see a score of them swept into the water.

When I was reading the books to Justin, Darien and especially Toby, we sometimes would talk about the “expendable shrews.” To show it means business and to add to the suspense, an adventure book like this needs to have some of the good characters die. But it can’t have major figures suffer death since, after all, it’s not Game of Thrones. To the shrews, therefore, goes the honor of perishing for the greater good.

In Russia’s invasion, it’s former convicts who are playing the role of the shrews. A recent Reuters article reports that convicts, insubordinate soldiers, and drunk recruits get pressed into Russian penal units known as “Storm-Z” squads and are routinely sent to the most exposed parts of the front line. “They’re just meat,” said one soldier, who disobeyed a commander by treating wounded Storm-Z fighters rather than just leaving them. Another fighter described similar conditions:

On the frontline, where we’ve been, we did not get deliveries of ammunition. We did not get water or food. The injured were not taken away: still now the dead are rotting…

At least, in the later Redwall books, there are instances of individual shrews getting rescued. In fact, there are fewer of them and they are more individuated.

In other words, after getting to know his animal characters, Jacques could not bring himself to see any of them as expendable. We should wish the same for Putin.

Further note: Having found similarities between Jacques and Tolkien, here’s the latter’s description of expendable Orcs. As it so happens, the Ukrainians draw upon Lord of the Rings, characterizing the Russian invaders as orcs. The scene is from the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers:

Then at last an answer came: a storm of arrows met them, and a hail of stones. They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point. Again trumpets rang, and a press of roaring men leaped forth. They held their great shields above them like a roof, while in their midst they bore two trunks of mighty trees. Behind them orc-archers crowded, sending a hail of darts against the bowmen on the walls. They gained the gates. The trees, swung by strong arms, smote the timbers with a rending boom. If any man fell, crushed by a stone hurtling from above, two others sprang to take his place. Again and again the great rams swung and crashed.

Unfortunately, like the defenders of Helm’s Gate, Ukraine will lose a battle of attrition. Russia has more lives to waste. The Ents save the Riders of Rohan and members of the fellowship but who will come to the support of the Ukrainians?

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To Understand Trump, Read Gogol

By Robin Bates | Published: October 2, 2023
F Moller, Nikolai Gogol

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Tuesday

Six years ago, when Donald Trump was in the first year of his presidency, I turned to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls to better understand why America had fallen for his con. After all, Gogol’s 1842 novel features two con men, the villainous protagonist Chichikov and the comically crazy and fascinating liar Nozdrev. As I watched a New York judge call out Trump’s real estate company for outrageously inflating the value of its holdings, I thought again of Gogol’s work.

The New York case, as The Washington Post reports, involves “statements of financial condition,” dating back to 2011, that have manipulated “the value of Trump’s property and other real estate assets by up to $2.2 billion annually.” Because of the fraud, “the real estate, hospitality and golf resort company received better interest and policy rates than it otherwise would have.”

The judge in that case has already ruled that certain aspects of Trump’s real estate fraud have been so egregious that, for the first count against him, a trial is unnecessary. When Trump’s lawyers argued that square footage estimates were subjective—30,000 square feet as opposed to actual 10,000 square feet—the judge declared, “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.”

Elsewhere he summed up Trump’s business practices as follows:

In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies. That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”

In Gogol’s novel, meanwhile, Chichikov is seeking to buy “dead souls”—which is to say, serfs who have died but who are still on the landowner’s tax rolls. Once he has acquired enough dead souls, he will take out a loan against them and pocket the money. In the course of buying, he comes up against another conman, Nozdrev, who is so transparent (unlike Chichikov) that one can only gape in wonder. When I wrote my two posts on the novel, I was trying to figure out which kind of con man Trump was, the vicious Chichikov or the relatively harmless Nozdrev. At the time, I associated Trump with the latter.

That’s because Nosdrev is mercurial and “a lover of fast living.” At one moment he seems to be your friend, at the next he is quarreling with you. Overall, he is “loquacious, dissipated, high-spirited, over-showy.”

Like Trump, Nosdrev must be constantly in the public eye and, like Trump, he thrives on conflict. Chaos appears to energize him:

Never at any time could he remain at home for more than a single day, for his keen scent could range over scores and scores of verses, and detect any fair which promised balls and crowds. Consequently in a trice he would be there—quarreling, and creating disturbances over the gaming-table…

Nozdrez, it turns out, has the same regard for the truth that Trump has:

Moreover, the man lied without reason. For instance, he would begin telling a story to the effect that he possessed a blue-coated or a red-coated horse; until, in the end, his listeners would be forced to leave him with the remark, “You are giving us some fine stuff, old fellow!”

Had social media existed in Nozdrev’s time, one could imagine him wielding it as effectively as the former president:

Also, men like Nozdrev have a passion for insulting their neighbors without the least excuse afforded…The more he became friendly with a man, the sooner would he insult him, and be ready to spread calumnies as to his reputation. Yet all the while he would consider himself the insulted one’s friend, and, should he meet him again, would greet him in the most amicable style possible, and say, “You rascal, why have you given up coming to see me.” Thus, taken all round, Nozdrev was a person of many aspects and numerous potentialities.

Also like Trump, Nozdrev promotes everything he’s connected with, refusing to let facts stand in his way. Here’s only one instance from the many where he makes extravagant claims while refusing to yield to rational assessment:

The tour began with a view of the stables, where the party saw two mares (the one a grey, and the other a roan) and a colt; which latter animal, though far from showy, Nozdrev declared to have cost him ten thousand rubles.
“You NEVER paid ten thousand rubles for the brute!” exclaimed the brother-in-law. “He isn’t worth even a thousand.”
“By God, I DID pay ten thousand!” asserted Nozdrev.
“You can swear that as much as you like,” retorted the other.
“Will you bet that I did not?” asked Nozdrev, but the brother-in-law declined the offer.

Nozdrev trying to make deals is like Trump selling “Trump steaks” that have someone else’s sticker on them. Both men are so transparently fraudulent that sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy the show, as the media did with Trump in 2016. Here is Nosdrev trying to sell some worthless dogs and then a worthless barrel organ to Chichikov:

“Then buy a few dogs,” said Nozdrev. “I can sell you a couple of hides a-quiver, ears well pricked, coats like quills, ribs barrel-shaped, and paws so tucked up as scarcely to graze the ground when they run.”
“Of what use would those dogs be to me? I am not a sportsman.”
“But I WANT you to have the dogs. Listen. If you won’t have the dogs, then buy my barrel-organ. ‘Tis a splendid instrument. As a man of honour I can tell you that, when new, it cost me fifteen hundred rubles. Well, you shall have it for nine hundred.”
“Come, come! What should I want with a barrel-organ? I am not a German, to go hauling it about the roads and begging for coppers.”
“But this is quite a different kind of organ from the one which Germans take about with them. You see, it is a REAL organ. Look at it for yourself. It is made of the best wood. I will take you to have another view of it.”
And seizing Chichikov by the hand, Nozdrev drew him towards the other room, where, in spite of the fact that Chichikov, with his feet planted firmly on the floor, assured his host, again and again, that he knew exactly what the organ was like, he was forced once more to hear how Marlborough went to the war.
“Then, since you don’t care to give me any money for it,” persisted Nozdrev, “listen to the following proposal. I will give you the barrel-organ and all the dead souls which I possess, and in return you shall give me your britchka, and another three hundred rubles into the bargain.”

For Nozdrev, deal making is a form of play. He is a bad dealmaker, as apparently Trump is as well, but one can’t help but admire his enthusiasm.

Chichikov, by contrast, is cold-blooded and calculating. When he figures that one can make millions by working in customs, he first figures out the lay of the land before cashing in. His initial step is to establish himself as an exemplary employee. His instincts are keen, and he knows the perfect moment when to elicit bribes from smugglers.

The result is that Chichikov grows rich whereas Nozdrev bankrupts himself and his estate—just as Trump would be bankrupt were it not for, first, a wealthy father and, second, Russian oligarchs and Arab shieks willing to launder money through his holdings. Oh, and millions of fans who send in money. Nozdrev’s problem is that he lacks a GoFundMe platform.

When I wrote about Gogol’s two conmen in 2017, I reflected that it made sense why rightwing voters would go for the flamboyant liar over the Chichikov-like politicians that he ran against. If many of Trump supporters despised the Paul Ryans and the Mitch McConnells almost as much as they did the Hillary Clintons, it’s because, like Chichikov, they carefully take the measure of every person in the system, add up their strengths and weaknesses, and act accordingly. If such types are assuring you that you will keep your healthcare in the very act of taking it away, I noted, why not just vote in Trump to blow everything up?

And because I didn’t know what to expect over the rest Trump’s presidency, I asked myself, who would I rather have running things: a blowhard that everyone knows to be a blowhard or a secretive conman who says all the right things but, as a result, is able to fleece us all the more effectively? At least when you get taken in by a Nozdrev or a Trump, I rationalized, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

What I failed to factor in is how a Nozdrev with presidential power would behave. Perhaps he would evolve from Gogol’s light-hearted bungler to something far more insidious. Not that Trump was ever as harmless as Nozdrev, as his assault victims will testify. Still, becoming president elevated his threat level to red.

People once laughed at Trump as they laugh at Nozdrev. They’re not laughing now.

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On Defending Books against Bullies

By Robin Bates | Published: October 1, 2023

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Monday

As this is Banned Book Week, I first look at literature banning before discussing how to respond to the banners. According to messaging consultant Antonia Scatton, there’s are ways to effectively counter those parents and others who are bullying and censoring teachers while banning books and closing down school libraries. First of all, however, here are a few observations about banning novels.

Having taught literature for over 40 years, I can testify to the vast range of things that a student can carry away from a work. As reader response theorist Norman Holland once observed, we replicate our identities as we read, which means that a passage which is of immense significance to one reader will often go unnoticed by another. Samuel Delany, the legendary African American science fiction writer, talks about zeroing in on a casual reference in an Isaac Azimov novel to a dusky-faced character. As Delany was trying to find a foothold in the overwhelmingly white 1950’s sci-fi world, that tiny detail meant all the world to him—and nothing at all to most other readers.

Songwriter Tom Lehrer humorously captures the phenomenon in his song “Smut,” written (I believe) in the 1960s. Here’s a stanza:

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder
For filth (I’m glad to say) is in
the mind of the beholder
When correctly viewed
Everything is lewd
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz, there’s a dirty old man!)

To demonstrate how far censors are willing to go, Oklahoma’s governor recently attacked National Public Television’s Clifford the Big Red Dog, a series based the Norman Bridwell books. (Apparently there are some lesbian characters in some episodes.)

When it’s not LGBTQ+ issues, censors are going after race and sex. For a Virginia woman recently profiled by the Washington Post, it’s sex. As Hannah Natanson’s article reports, Jennifer Petersen has made it her life’s mission to get books banned from school libraries and curricula:

Jennifer Petersen keeps 73 school books she detests in her basement.

She ordered most from Amazon. In the last year, she read each one. She highlighted and typed up excerpts from more than 1,300 pages — of the 24,000-plus pages she read — that she says depict sexual acts. Then she filed challenges against 71 of the books with Spotsylvania County Public Schools, the Virginia district where one of her children is a student and the other is a recent graduate. (Two books were removed before she could challenge them.)

Thanks to Petersen’s efforts, one of the books banned has been Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of America’s greatest novels, about which Petersen wrote, “The book illustrates the horrors of our history. However, the passages outlined do not add to the story and they are sexually explicit.”

Second guessing a Nobel-prize winning author for what does not add to a story shows a breathtaking level of arrogance. If, as I suspect, one of the scenes Petersen tagged was the slaveowner’s sons assaulting Sethe by sucking on her milk-filled breasts, then the scene is integral to the novel’s central theme of violation. It shows both how even slaveholders long for tenderness and how such longing is perverted by a system in which humans own other humans. The theme is taken up later when Sethe murders the very child she has suckled to save it from being returned to slavery. (Its ghost then proceeds to haunt her.)

Censors of all stripes have always had this blinkered arrogance. I think of those fanatical church reformers after Luther who shattered stained glass windows and destroyed musical instruments for (so they argued) interfering with receiving God’s word in plain and unadulterated fashion. Morrison shows the deep complexity of the world, a complexity that includes sexuality, but that’s of no interest to the Petersens of the world.

Who would you trust your kids with—a teacher who, often with years of experience, is seeking to develop well-rounded and mature individuals who can think for themselves? Or a zealot with a narrow ideological agenda?

So anyway, that’s my rant. Now to Antonia Scatton’s recommendations on how to respond to such people. Scatton, according to her website, is a “political messaging expert and communications consultant who is currently partnering with the DNC’s Association of State Democratic Committees to bring her message strategy training workshops to Party leadership, staff, candidates and elected officials across the country.” It so happens that this material is tailored for Virginia, in which Petersen is joined by Republican governor Glenn Youngkin in a culture war against its schools.

Welcome to Democrats Fight Back! Public Schools Edition
By Antonia Scatton

Top Talking Points!

On attacks about GLBTQ+ children and parents, Youngkin transgender student policy:

This is state-mandated discrimination, bigotry, and bullying. No child should ever be told that there is something wrong with them because of who they (or their parents) are.

On parents’ rights:

We take all parents beliefs into account, not just those who make the most noise. We’re not going to let a handful of right-wing vigilante parents with extreme minority views override the wishes of most parents.

On CRT and race:

We believe in teaching the truth about our history and our progress as a country.

On culture wars:

It’s puritanism for profit. It’s dangerous and dictatorial. It’s hurting our kids and impeding their education.

It’s book banning, surveillance and state censorship. This relentless teacher harassment is making it impossible for teachers to teach and driving them out of the profession.

This is a national campaign to discredit public schools for private profit and political power. It’s a coordinated effort by private corporations seeking to raid public school budgets. Keep public dollars in public schools.

On why public schools matter:

As a society, we have an obligation to educate every child.

Public schools are what make our children into free and functional adults. They are the engine of equality and economic mobility.

Public schools unite us and make us all Americans. They give us a set of shared American values and a common understanding of our history.

That’s why we need to:

Focus on learning. Help our kids get caught up, make up for lost time. Work with them and their parents to make sure that every single child is being challenged and inspired to do their very best.

Make our schools places where kids can feel welcomed, supported, and safe from bullying, discrimination and (gun) violence. Bring in new resources to support their safety and mental health.

To do that, we need to fully fund our schools. We need to recruit and retain teachers (and support staff) with the best skills and experience, and give them the pay they deserve and the resources, support and trust they need to do their incredibly important jobs.

Bonus:

Generally, we don’t want to engage in debates about gender issues in schools. That’s what they want us talking about. However, several Virginia candidates told me about events where voters were approached by Republican agitators and prompted to ask the candidates whether they wanted “men using girl’s bathrooms.” The best response to this is:

“Did it ever occur to you that Glenn Youngkin’s policy actually forces girls to use men’s bathrooms?”

In short, Scatton is suggesting that liberals take the offensive in responding to the attacks.

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No One Understood the Final Meal

By Robin Bates | Published: September 30, 2023
Ugolino da Siena, The Last Supper

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Sunday

Last week I reported on a talk given by Sewanee’s Jennifer Michael about finding God in the silences between words. At one point, she handed out a number of poems and had us discuss them in groups, including this tender poem about the Last Supper by Mark Jarman.

In “No One Understood the Final Meal,” Jarman points out that the disciplies could (of course) only grasp its significance upon looking back. After all, at the time it resembled other meals they had had with Jesus. “What was the order,” he asks at one point, only to respond, “But who can remember dinner yesterday?”

After the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, however, they sounght to repeat the meal—as best they could—in order to bring everything back. If they can recrate the details of that last supper, maybe they can bring back their friend.

It’s a very personal way of capturing the meaning of the eucharist. In eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood, we enter into an intimate relationship with him. This miraculous transformation originates in a simple meal.

No One Understood the Final Meal
By Mark Jarman

No one understood the final meal,
that it was final, each part with a meaning.
No one understood as it was served—
each portion of the body doled, poured out. 

Strange flesh. Strange drink.
Each portion of his body.
And as they ate and drank, he talked,
even had a private conversation.

All they remembered was eating with their friend,
a meal they’d had so many times
and known the order of. What was the order?
But who can remember dinner yesterday?

Forgiven for a crime not yet committed,
enjoined to remember someone not yet lost,
they tried to bring them back—
the taste and texture, somehow, the meal, him. 

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ChatGPT, Infernal Machine

By Robin Bates | Published: September 28, 2023
Shel Silverstein, “The Homework Machine”

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Friday

One of the benefits of being retired teacher is that I don’t have to grapple with the problems posed by ChatGPT, which is currently the worry of professors everywhere. An artificial intelligence program that can spit out custom-made essays takes plagiarism to a whole new level.

According to Wikipedia, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer “enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.” A philosophy colleague at Messiah University informs me that it is scaringly effective at mimicking the kinds of essays professors assign. One can even set the level, from kindergarten to graduate study. Sometimes he has had to check footnoted references—which appear to be actual references but are in fact bogus—to realize the essay is machine produced.

In other words, this Shel Silverstein poem does not do justice to such machines. Nevertheless, I share it to bring a little humor into the conversation. My professor son Tobias Wilson-Bates, to whom I used to read Silverstein’s poems, reminded me of it:

The Homework Machine
By Shel Silverstein

The Homework Machine,
Oh, the Homework Machine,
Most perfect
contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’
Three?
Oh me . . .
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

Toby once joked that it seems like a tremendous waste of money and effort to create a machine designed to generate first-year-student essays. But of course, it can do a lot more.

From my pedagogical perspective, the problem with ChatGPT is that tremendous learning and brain growth come from grappling with the different stages of writing an essay, from the “shitty rough draft” (Anne Lamott’s phrase) to the polished final product. Putting aside the ethical issue of passing along someone else’s work—or something else’s work—as your own, the whole purpose of education is undermined when all you have to do is push a button. It’s like watching an exercise video in lieu of doing the actual exercises. The discovery process that comes from interpreting a work of lit is circumvented.

In my own teaching, because I insisted that the students had to have something at stake in their essays, I encouraged them to find personal application in the works they chose. Often they responded with remarkable insights, both into the works and into their lives. I am told, however, the Chat GPT can fabricate seemingly authentic encounters with poems. I think of the George Burns quote: “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”

Toby, who teaches many non-traditional students at Georgia Gwinnett College, has his students do a lot of writing in class, which is one way of addressing the issue. My Messiah colleague takes it on more directly, having the students analyze ChatGPT responses. In other words, the new challenges posted by AI are prompting teachers to become more creative.

The days of such machines messing up the answer to “nine plus four,” however, are long gone.

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America’s Political Violence Problem

By Robin Bates | Published: September 27, 2023
Cover art for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

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Thursday

Increasingly I’m hearing Donald Trump described as a “stochastic terrorist,” which is someone who demonizes his or her enemies so that they stand a chance of becoming targets of violence. We saw him behaving as such, of course, when he got his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and now it appears that the former president is employing stochastic terrorism as a way to keep from going to jail. If he can use threats of retribution to intimidate his foes, perhaps he may once again escape accountability.

While this might strike us as un-American, we have seen instances of stochastic terrorism throughout our history. Violence has always been latent, awaiting individuals or events to trigger it. An author like Cormac McCarthy understands this well, as do William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), James Dickey, Toni Morrison, and others. I focus here on McCarthy because, as a contemporary, he sensed where we are now. This essay draws on two past posts as it applies Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West to the dangers of Trumpian violence.

According to the recent Mitt Romney biography, Trump’s stochastic terrorism swayed votes during his impeachment hearings. As the Washington Post reports,

“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins writes. “The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?

“Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”

Since his numerous indictments, Trump’s threats have only escalated. After one set of rulings, he sent out word, “If you come after me, I’m coming after you.” Pundit David Corn has other instances, including one that brings to mind the 2018 attack on a Pittsburg synagogue, in which 11 died. Corn points out,

In a Rosh Hashanah message posted on social media earlier this month, Trump railed against “liberal Jews”: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”

Trump has also called Army General Mike Miller, whom the former president hates for standing up to him, “treasonous” and worthy of death. (Texas congressman Paul Gosar followed this up with his own instance of stochastic terrorism, writing in his weekly newsletter, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”)

And then there are Trump’s attacks on NBC News, MSNBC and Comcast for committing “Country Threatening Treason.” As New York University’s expert on terrorism Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently pointed out,

it is clearer than ever that inciting political violence is Trump’s political project, and his campaign appearances and events must be seen in that light. Trump is a marketer… [N]ow his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward. 

She writes that Trump’s visit yesterday to a gun shop to admire a customized “Trump 45” Glock “was inevitable.”

African Americans have long known that White elites turn to authoritarian violence to control them. Women, American Jews, Latinos, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and others have encountered their own versions of such coercion. What’s new, perhaps, is that (1) many of us thought America had left such violence behind and (2) now it is also straight White males who are being threatened. Whereas once White liberals such as myself had to take an imaginative leap into another perspective—that’s why novels by authors from diverse backgrounds are so important—now we are seeing up close what these others groups saw. On January 6, it was White members of Congress and White cops who were included in the targets. And it’s judges, lawyers, jury members, FBI agents, military personnel, journalists, and others who find themselves on hate lists.

I said I’d look back at American history before turning to Cormac McCarthy, and for this I draw on Richard Slotkin’s 1992 study of the Western, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. As Slotkin observes, America has often framed political violence as a frontier drama. Although America is hardly the only country to experience violence—in fact, most countries have bloody histories—it has had a distinctive way of framing the drama. For America, the myth involves subduing a recalcitrant wilderness. “Regeneration through violence,” Slotkin says, is the American myth.

Throughout American history, he notes, there have been different versions of this myth, from the Puritans emphasizing “the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure” to

Jeffersonians (and later, the disciples of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” [seeing] the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original “social contract”; [or] Jacksonian Americans [seeing] the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.

Trumpism is closest to the Jacksonian model—think of Jackson’s role in the Trail of Tears—but in each case, Slotkin says, the Myth

represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.

When Trump in 2017 gave his “American carnage” inaugural address, describing America as a nation under attack by forces domestic and foreign (Muslims, urban Blacks, Central American immigrants), he was invoking this myth, which may be why his vision has resonated with so many. When he has praised the tactics used by thuggish dictators like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or when he has pardoned the court-martialed Navy Seal and psycho killer Eddie Gallagher, so-called responsible Republicans could rationalize that his actions were the primitive means needed to regenerate American society. “Trump is crude,” they would say, “but maybe it takes someone like him to shake things up.”

It should be noted that, while the “regeneration through violence” myth had its origins in the Indian wars, it has mapped easily onto other American conflicts, including those involving race and labor movements. For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation (1915), one sees the KKK playing the role of the U.S. calvary, riding to the rescue of people under assault from, not Indians but rampaging ex-slaves. Because they do so, Northerners and Southerners can reunite after their bitter war and a new nation can be born.

One sees the myth played out in many of Hollywood’s greatest westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and others. In the 1970s, the western got transferred to urban settings but the theme was the same: Dirty Harry resorts to primitive means, with thugs now playing the role previously taken by Indians, as he deals out the unregulated violence necessary to restore civilization.

Slotkin focuses mainly on cinema in his study, but one finds literary westerns grappling with the same theme. Along with Blood Meridian, which I’ll turn to in a moment, there’s Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel mourns (like Frederick Jackson Turner) the closing of the frontier, conveying a sense that the age of heroes is past once we’ve civilized the entire nation. While one is reading the novel, however, one cheers on Gus and Cal, the two Texas rangers who take the law into their own hands. Such actions are necessary in a landscape that includes a murderous Indian (Blue Duck) and a pathological gang of outlaws (the Suggs Brothers).

In the end, the rangers prevail, showing cattlemen that they can take their cattle from Texas to Montana’s green pastures. In their success, however, the rangers render themselves obsolete. Like John Wayne in a number of his movies, Cal cannot join the civilization he has helped bring about. In the process, however, the violence that he and Gus have resorted to has served its purpose.

While McMurtry may think we have reached an end of the violence so that rangers are no longer necessary, however, McCarthy is another story. Forget about regeneration, I hear him saying as his murderous Judge Holden rampages through the 19th century American west, killing Indians and settlers alike. More of an archetype than a flesh-and blood figure, Holden by the end is proclaiming that he will never die, which may be how McCarthy sees America. Perhaps exposing the comforting myth that society can ever find stability, McCarthy’s novel disturbs because it suggests that violence is perpetual and social order hangs by a thread.

The novel is based on the carnage caused by John Joel Glanton and his ruthless gang of scalp hunters following the Mexican American War (1846-48). We first encounter Holden when, as if on a whim, he enters a revival meeting and fabricates a charge that turns the audience against the preacher. He’s a stochastic terrorist in this scene, behaving as Trump did on January 6:

Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an impostor. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.

On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God…

Let’s hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.

Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.

Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistole from his boot he leveled it and fired.

More shots are fired, someone seams the tent, and there follows a mass exodus, with people “pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud.”

When the Judge later admits to having fabricated the charge, like Trump he is appreciated for his entertainment value. At that point, his auditors become complicit in his action. Maybe they, like Trump supporters, get a thrill from the judge’s sheer audacity, and also from his sadism:

Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?
You mean the Reverend Green?
Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here.
I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.
They looked from one to the other.
Well where was it you run up on him?
I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.
He raised his glass and drank.
There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.

I want to caution against pushing comparisons between Trump and the Judge, since Holden is a sophisticated, learned, and refined psychopath whereas Trump (in the words of Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien) is driven by nothing more complicated than “self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.” The former president, O’Brien observes, “thinks about money, food, sex, and revenge. Very little else. Maybe sports.” Both men, however, act with impunity.

What we get in the revival meeting is only a taste of what is to come as the Judge joins with the Glanton gang on their murder spree. The narrative sucks us in somewhat since, at first, they are battling “bad” Indians (bloodthirsty Comanches and Apaches). Then, however, we see them attacking peaceful Pueblo villages and Mexican townspeople. As an extra flourish, sometimes the Judge will casually break the neck of a child or drop a gift of puppies into a river.

By the end of the novel, the Judge is orchestrating a dance, which becomes a metaphor for the great human drama. Only the truly barbaric man, he tells the protagonist, can really dance this dance:

Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance…

The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.

At the end, McCarthy reflects on the Judge and his dance:

His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

I have sometimes wondered what drives a writer to imagine worlds that lack any sympathetic characters. Why doesn’t McCarthy write more novels like All the Pretty Horses, which features a protagonist of unimpeachable integrity who stands up against the forces of darkness? Why Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, with its cold-blooded and seemingly invincible killer Anton Chiguhr?

But if the world is truly becoming a place where stochastic terrorists such as Trump can thumb their noses at judges—if horror really does speak to humanity’s “inmost heart”–then maybe McCarthy is using the lawless and violent west to get at a vital truth. Perhaps he sees us as further gone than we realize.

At the very least, McCarthy’s vision tests those of us who like to think that civilization will triumph over barbarism in the great American democratic experiment.

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Why Belief in Phony Conspiracies?

By Robin Bates | Published: September 26, 2023
Trump rally

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Wednesday

Two weeks ago I puzzled over why certain college-educated people, including economics professor Peter Navarro, fall for Donald Trump’s con. I speculated that the thrill of acting with complete impunity, like H.G. Wells’s invisible man, was such a drug that it overrode the brain’s capacity for reason.

But while this may explain some of the behavior of the Trump cult, it doesn’t explain all of it. After all, I’ve met other supposedly intelligent people who, with no power payoff, embrace wild theories about about vaccines, JFK’s assassination, 9-11, and other things. Therefore, I took notice when the novel I reported on yesterday—Richard Powers’s The Overstory—has a character studying why smart people believe stupid stuff. And that in turn was bolstered by a blog essay that also took the subject up, posted by legal expert Jay Kuo at Status Kuo.

Adam Appich, a psychology grad student in an Affect and Cognition class, is intrigued when a professor explains why teaching psychology is “a waste of time.” He points out that, despite all the students have learned about hidden biases, they are just as susceptible to hidden biases as other people:

Now I’ll show you the self-evaluations of people asked how susceptible they think they are to anchoring, causal base rate errors, the endowment effect, availability, belief perseverance, confirmation, illusory correlation, cuing—all the biases you’ve learned bout in this course. Here are the scores of the control group. And here are the scores of people who’ve taken this course in previous years.”

Lots of laughs: the numbers are pretty much the same. Both groups confident of their iron will, clear vision, and independent thought.

The professor than lists a number of myths that his students believe:

Course grads, working twice as hard to save five bucks as they would to earn it. Grads fearing bears, sharks, lightning, and terrorists more than they fear drunk drivers. Eighty percent thinking they’re smarter than average. Grads wildly inflating how many jelly beans they think are in a jar, based purely on someone else’s ridiculous guesses.

The fault lies not in the stars but, he says, in our psyche:

The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.

We then see the teacher’s point made dramatically. Suddenly he staggers, flails, and rushes out of the room. No one moves, even though it turns out that he’s having a heart attack and dies in the hallway.

Adam thinks the professor is acting to make a point about the famous Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” where no one acts because no one else is acting. In this case, however, his death is actual.

To further study group behavior, Adam decides to write his thesis about climate activists trying to protect the redwoods. Perhaps, through psychological science, he can understand the forces that drive them. They proceed to turn the tables on him, however. It is everyone else, they say, who is in the grip of bystander effect, doing nothing as the world is destroyed around them:

“It’s so simple,” [Maidenhair] says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity….”Is the house on fire?”

A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.”

“And you want to observe the handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”

Adam at this point mentions his professor and the bystander effect, saying, “The larger the group…,” to which Maidenhair responds,

“…the harder it is to cry, Fire?”
“Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—”
“—lots of people would already have—”
“—with six billion other—”
“Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two-thirds of the planet’s net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”

At this point, Adam starts rethinking his dissertation, which begins to seem like a distraction. “He needs to study illness on an unimaginable scale, an illness no bystander could even see to recognize,” he concludes.

Now to Jay Kuo’s thoughts on the Trump cult and their belief in conspiracies. Citing a Duke cognitive psychologist and a Harvard cognitive scientist (Elizabeth Marsh and Nadia Brashier), he says that our brains judge the truth or falsity of a piece of information in multiple ways. In addition to relying on what we see with our own eyes, we also

develop strong emotional attachments to certain narratives because they help shape our identities. Social emotions, such as anger, gratitude, and grief, guide how we view our own personal welfare versus that of others. We defend these constructed identities vigorously, even when wrong, because our self-worth is tied up with being members of a group.

Along with emotional attachment, we

tend to judge the truth of something by its consistency, meaning that the more our brains encounter the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. Repetition within modern informational echo chambers has increased the power of conspiracies manyfold as we hear the same stories repeated by “trusted” members of our social networks. And media propaganda such as we see on the Fox network works so effectively precisely because it is drilled into viewers again and again, and the messaging is consistent across multiple outlets and channels.

Kuo is particularly interested in the three big conspiracies driving the MAGA right at the moment: that the election was stolen, that President Biden presides over a crime family, and that federal and state prosecutors are coordinating their efforts to interfere with the 2024 election. For our purposes today, we could add fourth: That human-caused climate change is a hoax, perpetuated by Democrats and the entire scientific community. “Once our brains are ready to accept a false idea as true,” Kuo says, “we are primed to accept a bigger falsehood.”

And how do we get people believing such immense conspiracies? Kuo cites Robert Brotherton of Barnard College, author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories, who says that the bigger an idea is, the bigger an explanation we expect to hear. In other words, the bigger the falsehood, the bigger the conspiracy. Once the falsehood is planted, we obsessively look for other things that will prop it up, including unseen others.

Adam leaves us with one other insight. Asked, as a psychologist, “How do we convince people that we’re right,” he responds, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

Conspiracy theories are, in the minds of some, good stories, although ultimately they’re one dimensional, repetitive and fairly boring. By contrast trees, as Richard Power convinces us through his compelling novel, have a much more interesting story to tell. As his tree scientist Patricia Westerford says in the passage I quoted yesterday,

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to.

If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored.

Art, including novels like Overstory, has a major role to play in getting us to hear and pass on these stories. Our existence as a species is at stake.

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