Oct. 18, No Kings Day: Arise, Now, Arise

By Robin Bates | Published: October 12, 2025
Bernard Hill as Théoden

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Monday

Political scientist John Stoehr has suggested a striking literary parallel that is on the mark: think of White House Trump advisor Stephen as Wormtongue to Donald Trump’s Théoden. I add the qualifier that the comparison works only when we are talking about Théoden in his decrepit state, not the Théoden who returns to his former self as heroic king.

As Stoehr sees it, Trump is suffering from early dementia, which gives Miller a golden opportunity to manipulate him:

[Miller has] been on TV a lot lately, because that’s how he pours more poison into the president’s already-poisoned brain. He doesn’t whisper lies into the ear of the old and demented sovereign the way Wormtongue does in Tolkien’s epic. King Théoden didn’t have a TV. His Majesty Donald Trump can’t stop watching his. So Miller delivers the poison that way.

Miller, Stoehr believes, wishes to goad Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act and imposing martial law:

In the days since, Miller has repeated a variation of that “insurrection” theme during numerous TV appearances. Last night, for instance, he told a CNN anchor that ICE protesters are “actually, as we speak, trying to overthrow the core law enforcement function of the federal government. … ICE officers have to street battle against antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night, to come and go from their building.”

I don’t know if we can entirely give Miller credit for Trump demanding the imprisonment of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson. Trump, after all, has wanted many of his enemies to be jailed and has set the Justice Department on some of them. Miller, however, has been fanning the flames.

Which is what Wormtongue does, persuading Théoden to lock up his loyal follower Eomer, despite the field general having notched a significant victory over a band of orcs. Wormtongue, it turns out, is actually working for a foreign power—think of him as Tolkien’s version of a Putin whisperer—and it takes outside intervention from Gandalf to expose him.

While Stoehr has Miller’s number, it might be more useful to see both him and Trump as Wormtongue, with Théoden as America. Both are pouring poison into our ears. And if that’s the case, he have an inspiring image once Théoden awakens to the threat. In an uplifting scene, he steps out of darkness and into the sunshine:

Slowly Théoden left his chair. A faint light grew in the hall again. The woman hastened to the king’s side, taking his arm, and with faltering steps the old man came down from the dais and paced softly through the hall. Wormtongue remained lying on the floor. They came to the doors and Gandalf knocked.

“Open!” he cried. “The Lord of the Mark comes forth!”

And further on:

“Now, lord,” said Gandalf, “look out upon your land! Breathe the free air again!”

Perhaps, in writing this scene, Tolkien is thinking of Britain emerging from World War II and the shadow of fascism. Seen in our current context, Rohan is America emerging from the threat of Trumpism. “It is not so dark here,” the king observes, to which Gandalf replies, “No. Nor does age lie so heavily on your shoulders as some would have you think. Cast aside your prop!” Théoden does so:

From the king’s hand the black staff fell clattering on the stones. He drew himself up, slowly, as a man that is stiff from long bending over some dull toil. Now tall and straight he stood, and his eyes were blue as he looked into the opening sky.

Théoden fears for his country as many of us fear for ours:

“Dark have been my dreams of late,” he said, “but I feel as one new awakened. I would now that you had come before, Gandalf. For I fear that already you have come too late, only to see the last days of my house. Not long now shall stand the high hall which Brego son of Eorl built. Fire shall devour the high seat. What is to be done?”

Gandalf can’t offer him easy reassurance. But because doing nothing at all is to invite sure defeat, he urges the king to gather his loyal followers around him and resist the impending threat of Saruman and Sauron. Critical in this effort is the inspiring call to the Rohan’s riders:

‘Will you not take the sword?’ said Gandalf. Slowly Théoden stretched forth his hand. As his fingers took the hilt, it seemed to the watchers that firmness and strength returned to his thin arm. Suddenly he lifted the blade and swung it shimmering and whistling in the air. Then he gave a great cry. His voice rang clear as he chanted in the tongue of Rohan a call to arms.

Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Dire deeds awake, dark is it eastward.
Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded!
Forth Eorlingas!

This coming Saturday Americans can march in demonstrations that are being held all over the country. Arise now, arise, sons and daughters of American democracy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Jesus Heals a Leper among Lepers

By Robin Bates | Published: October 11, 2025
Patrick J. Murphy, Jesus Heals the Ten

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Sunday

Whenever the day’s Gospel reading involves Jesus’s healing ministry, I turn to Lory Widmer Hess’s When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible. This remarkable book responds to each of those stories with a poem, an interpretation, and a personal application. For today’s story about Jesus and the ten lepers, Hess identifies with the one who has two strikes against him—he’s a leper and a Samaritan—, noting that this “leper amongst lepers” finds a higher level of healing, one that is intertwined with gratitude.

Here’s the story:

Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.

One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17:11–19)

The action of turning back brings to Hess’s mind Lot’s wife, who also turned back. That story too involves the number 10, since

For ten good men
God would have saved
a city doomed
to perish in flames.

Connecting the two stories, Hess identifies more with the unrighteous than the righteous, with the one who is doubly cursed and who is

always to be kept
at a distance, apart
from the righteous, uncorrupted ones.

But although, in her dark moments, she has identified with Lot’s wife, looking back at the life she lost and standing “like a pillar pointing nowhere,” she then realizes that there’s another way of turning back. Although she has been trapped in salt, which carries with it associations with tears, she can break out of that static pose and journey back in a different way, which the tenth leper does:

Let the life in me rise
and break through my salt.
Let the pillar be gone.
I will find a new direction.
I will point toward him.

Here’s her poem:

Turned Back
By Lory Hess

For ten good men
God would have saved
a city doomed
to perish in flames.

But ten good men
could not be found.
Corruption reigned.
The city burned.
The righteous fled.

And one, unsaved,
was turned to salt,
to stand forever
looking back.

Even before
my skin turned to salt
I was one of the untouchables.

A Samaritan stands beyond the pale
for the ones who turn
toward Zion’s hill,

always to be kept
at a distance, apart
from the righteous, uncorrupted ones.

And never, never allowed to return
to the heart of their life,
to the God of their truth.

Now here we stand
in the space between:
nine men who might be good enough,
and one apart,
a leper among lepers.

I can stand among them,
but am not one of them.
I can cry out with them,
but their God will not hear me.

I can look back to the life I lost
and stand like a pillar
pointing nowhere.

But here comes life
along the road.
Here he is,
the Living One,
the one who will hear me,
the one who will answer,
the one who despises
nothing that lives.

Let the life in me rise
and break through my salt.
Let the pillar be gone.
I will find a new direction.
I will point toward him.

Let the others go on their righteous way
I will not move without giving thanks
to the one who turns toward our salvation.

He didn’t have to look for us.
He didn’t have to hear our cry.
He could have gone on, but he turned back.
He turned me back to myself.

And now
forever
I turn
to him

As Hess sees it, there are two steps in the healing process. The nine non-Samaritan lepers take only the first whereas the Samaritan experiences “an awakening of the true self”:

As we worship in spirit and in truth, we are healed of divisions arising from inessentials. The men who did not turn back were cleansed, they underwent catharsis, but were they truly healed? We need to add another step to the process, an awakening to the source of our blessings, turning toward it to form a new relationship full of love, mutual acceptance and gratitude. This does not happen unconsciously as we walk dully along our usual paths. It is an awakening of the true self: an activity that can be called “faith,” which leads to resurrection.

Applying the story to the times when she herself has grappled with illness, Hess says that the story reminds her of the importance of gratitude in the healing process. She says she is grateful, not only for the healing she has experienced, but for the illness itself, which has allowed her to know the power of healing. Put another way, she says she is grateful, “not only for the homecoming, but also for the journey into distant, uncomfortable and frightening places,” since that journey has enabled her “to truly know, appreciate, and value home upon my return.”

She concludes,

Gratitude for the gift of life, and for all that enables me to live, can germinate in the place of emptiness, and when it grows and expands, it makes me strong to receive all the further gifts God wants to bestow upon me.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

School Reading vs. Real Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: October 9, 2025

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Friday

I seem unable to leave off writing about my childhood so, in this Friday installment of My Life in Literature, I look once again at grades one through seven in Sewanee Public School. (In eighth grade I attended a French school in Paris, which will get its own essay.)

The years were 1957-1964 and the United States was experiencing a baby boom, which meant that our classes were packed. While we never hit 40 kids, we came up short by only two or three.

We had wooden desks joined by iron struts and featuring ink wells, although we were past the era when we used them as such. We were always seated in alphabetical order, and year after year we had the same five boys in the first row: Bruce Baird, Michael Barry Robin Bates, Binky Beaumont, and Tommy Camp (only Tommy, for whom I would later serve as best man, had eyesight and hearing difficulties and so was moved up to the front desk).

For the most part I remember school being a colossal bore. The textbooks we had were uninspired, and at nine or ten I remember arriving at the following theory: there are two kinds of reading, the reading you do in school and real reading. School reading featured dull stories with three or four questions at the end to ensure that we took something important away from the experience. Real reading involved stories and poems that we read on our own (like The Hardy Boys) or that my father read to us (Huckleberry Finn, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Captains Courageous).

I’ve mentioned in the past how, because we didn’t have a television, I felt out of step with the other children. They would show up in class with the latest fad—hula hoops one year, yoyos another, troll dolls with long hair another, Beatles paraphernalia another—along with the latest fashion in notebooks and pens. I had no idea where these were coming from but everyone seemed to have them. I now realize, however, that the real reading I was doing at home gave me a kind of anchor to my being. I may not have seen the latest installment of The Beverly Hillbillies or Get Smart but I sensed that there was a richness in the world that provided life with meaning.

Seventh grade had one silver lining: we were introduced to Junior Scholastic books, which we could order for absurdly low prices. I remember purchasing Escape from Warsaw, Lost Cities and Ancient Civilizations, and a cartoon book about moments in history. These, however, were outside what was assigned. In English class, we were subjected to grammar exercises, spelling tests, and sentence diagramming, the latter of which even Mrs. Kirby-Smith didn’t totally understand. (Her name, incidentally, signaled that she was married to a descendant of the last Confederate general to surrender and who returned to Sewanee to teach math after the Civil War.)

The boredom problem existed as well with social studies. Up through fifth grade, we studied only geography, learning uninteresting facts from dull textbooks. Things got a little better in sixth grade when we studied world history. I was already prepped for this since I had been reading a lot of history at home, belonging as I did to the Landmark Book Club, which sent me a history book every month. I preferred the books about European history (the Vikings, Marco Polo, Joan of Arc, the Crusades) over those about American history (Daniel Boone, George Washington, the Civil War, the Mormons), but all of them were better than our history textbook.

I remember having one moment of revelation. The Landmark book about the Mormons was probably written by a Mormon, which meant that it was laudatory. I then read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet, where Mormonism is depicted as a dark cult that will track down members who escape its clutches. For the first time in my life I realized that historical facts can be variously interpreted.

My favorite grade was fourth, partly because of the wonderful Mrs. Burton and partly because my mother came in several days a week to teach us French. I remember her cheerily greeting us with, “Bonjours, mes enfants. Comment allez-vous?” to which we would always respond, “Bonjours, Madame. Très bien, merci. Et vous?” I also remember my best friend Chris Mayfield writing the script for “Blanche Neiges and Les Sept Nains” [“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”], for which she got to choose her role. (Having a flair for the dramatic, Chris chose the wicked stepmother.) School was not boring in those moments.

Recess made school a little more bearable. We had two recesses a day, often unsupervised, and I remember my second-grade class once engaging in a spirited mudball fight, featuring red Tennessee clay. (The teacher must have been horrified when we trooped in, mud spattered, so that never happened again.) I also remember a moment in first grade when Jane Arlington whirled around and clocked me for something I said, bloodying my nose. We also played a lot of softball, which I enjoyed, and I particularly liked the annual field day at the end of the year, when we spent all day outside engaging in various competitions. Though small for my age, I was one of the faster runners.

I know I’m getting away from books here so I’ll round out the rest of my non-book life before finishing up. I was in the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts and may have been one of the few of my peers who recognized their origin in The Jungle Books. (I made it to the rank of Life but never to Eagle because, even though I had six more merit badges than was required, I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to pass Life Saving.) I also took piano lessons and choir at the urging of my mother, a fine pianist, but exited as soon as I could. The activity I loved most was tennis, which became one of the great joys of my life and which I have been playing ever since.

I also spent a lot of time clambering around Sewanee’s cliffs and caves, sometimes imagining myself as the Hardy Boys in The House on the Cliff; sometimes as the Bobbsey Twins (one of their books has them caught in a cave and cut off by the incoming tide); sometimes as the Scotch twins in the Lucy Finch Perkins book by that name; sometimes as Tintin in The Black Island (we had all the Tintin books, which had not yet been translated). Sewanee’s child-accessible wilderness—we could bicycle everywhere—meant that I related to books with open vistas, such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Swallows and Amazons, Last of the Mohicans, Wind in the Willows (the wild wood chapter), and the Oz books.  

I conclude with one final memory. A high point of those seven years was a case of mononucleosis that I contracted at age 12. The mono was probably caused by the stress of our participation in a civil rights lawsuit (described here), but on the plus side it pulled me out of school for an extended period. Indeed, I think my mother, realizing how unhappy I was, allowed me to extend the home stay. In that period I buried myself in books, including (as I mentioned in a previous installment) Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew. I also reread Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and the George MacDonald Princess and Curdie books; listened so many times to a recording of actor Cecil Richards reading Alice in Wonderland that I had all the poems memorized; and listened to our recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. I didn’t miss school one bit.

As for the next “My Life in Literature” installment, allow me to announce it by borrowing from one of Howard R. Garis’s Uncle Wiggly stories, which my father read to us at a young age. Uncle Wiggly is a story-telling rheumatic rabbit whose (admittedly formulaic) adventures appeared in newspaper form for 50 years, beginning in 1910. To announce the upcoming installment, each story ended with something like “if the canary bird doesn’t take my lead pencil and stick it in his seed dish…” or “if the pussy cat doesn’t think the automobile tire is a bologna sausage, and tries to nibble a piece out to make a sandwich for the rag doll’s picnic…” So, in next Friday’s post, “if the onion doesn’t make tears come into the eyes of the potato when they’re playing tag around the spoon in the soup dish,” I’ll tell you about my book-intense year in France.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed

History That Refuses to Die

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2025

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Thursday

In my last two posts, after describing Edgar Allan Poe as an author who dreamt America’s nightmares, I went on to examine two authors—Stephen King and Toni Morrison—who have found themselves on banned book lists for having ventured into the same dark areas. Imagine my satisfaction, then, when I came across a recent article mentioning Morrison’s debt to Poe. In “To Haunt and Be Haunted: On the Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe,” Ed Simon examines why an author who writes about European manor houses and Italian wine cellars is as American as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “There is no true American book,” he writes, “if it doesn’t address genuine monsters”:

Here is the paradox, for in his silence Poe was actually the most American, exemplifying our national talent at sublimation and repression. Edgar Allan Poe, adopted son of a Virginian enslaver; Edgar Allan Poe, who managed the sale of a human being owned by his mother-in-law. “No early American writer,” notes Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, “is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe.” A writer who, as with the best of them, always said more in what he didn’t say, obsessed with that which was too horrible to contemplate. Such history can be buried, but it’s buried alive. The scratching at the lid is incessant.

The scratching at the lid is an allusion to Poe’s “The Premature Burial” although it could also apply to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Madeleine Usher is also buried alive. The horror of the latter story lies in the uneasy sense that precedes that actual revelation:

[A]nd now with a feeling of wild amazement –for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound…

This all occurs when the narrator is reading to Roderick Usher, who then confirms what he is hearing:

Not hear it? –yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long –long –long –many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it –yet I dared not –oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! –I dared not –I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them –many, many days ago –yet I dared not –I dared not speak!… [I have heard] the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!” here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul –“MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!

Morrison says that this presence of something dark and looming—what she calls the “Africanist presence”–has always existed in the American psyche, countering the social narrative of optimism, confidence and newness that whites prefer. Turning a blind eye to how American exceptionalism has relied on slavery, Native American genocide, and the ruthless exploitation of various minorities (including, at various times, Mexicans, the Chinese, and the Irish) is one way that Americans could feel good about themselves.

Sometimes they will go to extraordinary lengths to ignore the history. A recent example is Defense Secretary Pet Hegseth exonerating the soldiers who carried out the horrific 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of 250 Lakota Sioux men, women and children. In past posts I’ve mentioned how, when I was learning about President Andrew Jackson in 7th grade Tennessee history, there was no mention of his infamous Trail of Tears, even though it went right through our playground. Nor were North Carolina students taught about the 1898 Wilmington massacre or Oklahoma students about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Last night, in a session sponsored by Sewanee’s Friends of the Library (which I head), we learned about Tennessee’s continuing efforts to whitewash history, which includes removing from library shelves books about the Holocaust, the Japanese internment, and Black history in general. But such attempted erasures, instead of eliminating the scratching, just increase the intensity so that (to switch stories) they grow “louder! louder! louder! louder!” (“Tell-Tale Heart”).

As a result, the world feels like an increasingly frightening place, with new candidates for demonization cropping up every moment (and every election cycle): Muslims, immigrants, transgenders, feminists, city dwellers. As Freud has taught us, what is repressed becomes toxic and returns in the form of monsters, and in their fear people embrace guns and violence. Further repression, of course, just deepens the fears so that soon every protester, every Charlie Kirk critic, every Black female prosecutor, every Democratic governor who opposes Trump, must be locked up or fired.

In classic American literature, these dark fears achieve particular prominence in Southern Gothic writers such as Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, and especially William Faulkner. Having witnessed the horrors of racism close-up, they realize they are harder to bury. Consequently, in a novel like Faulkner’s Light in August, one sees the hysteria set in motion by a biracial character who defies easy racial characterization, thereby calling into question that whole system of differentiation upon which people base their identities. In the end, Joe Christmas is castrated and killed in an act designed to restore order.

But order can never be restored as long as it is reliant on the oppression of others. Until we face up to it and actively seek to fulfill the promise articulated in “the Declaration of Independence,” that past will not only fail to die but (to borrow from Faulkner) never become past.

A further note on Sewanee’s Banned Book Week event: In last night’s session we heard from children’s book author Christina Soontornvat, a founding member of Authors against Book Bans, and Keri Lambert of the Rutherford County [Tennessee] Library Alliance, which recently received the Tennessee Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award. Lambert reported on the concerted effort in Murfreesboro, Tennessee to ban books and how that effort has expanded to the state legislature, which is attempting to circumvent Supreme Court rulings while threatening teachers and librarians with legal action. Soontornvat, meanwhile, observed that parents should be grateful that educators are providing professional guidance regarding what books will benefit individual students, such guidance often being absent when it comes to their internet use. She also noted that book banners often cite passages out of context from books they haven’t read.

Lambert reported that, after a fundamentalist church would come to school board meetings in white shirts to attack books, their opponents countered by wearing purple. The result is that Murfreesboro librarians are now forbidden to wear purple. Rainbow colors are also verboten.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

“Kavanaugh Stops” and Catch-22

By Robin Bates | Published: October 7, 2025

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Wednesday

I recently invoked Brecht in a post about how the Supreme Court’s rightwing members are green lighting racial profiling, but I could just as well have cited Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. That’s because, even as it gives ICE the freedom to “seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job” (to quote from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s stinging dissent), it also has stripped them of legal recourse if they are so seized.

Here’s Yossarian encountering Catch-22:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

A writer for The Ink lays out the situation. First there is what has become known as “the Kavanaugh Stop” given that justice’s defense of racial profiling:

[A]s for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.

We’re seeing increasing instances where this is not in fact the case—the Ink article observes that, “from the beginning of Stephen Miller’s mass deportation effort, U.S. citizens and noncitizen residents have been repeatedly ensnared in raids”—but for to these victims Kavanaugh offers further reassurance:

To the extent that excessive force has been used, the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies should be available in federal court.

Here, however, the Supreme Court’s Catch-22 clicks into effect. Citing Damon Root at Reason, the article observes that “Kavanaugh here is forgetting about — or ignoring — his own earlier ruling that made it more or less impossible for somebody abused by federal agents to get such remedies.” Thanks to the Court’s 2022 majority opinion in Egbert v. Boule, it is “practically impossible to sue a federal officer over an alleged constitutional rights violation.”

In other words, Kavanaugh is contending that, while the Constitution protects people from excessive force, they can’t do anything against someone who uses excessive force.

[Respectful whistle]

Further thought: I’m trying to figure out if the following SCOTUS rulings are a Catch-22: law enforcement officers are allowed to take race into account when they arrest people, but colleges are not allowed to take race into account in the admissions process. Color blind for thee but not for me.

Perhaps this isn’t an instance of Catch-22, which is a hellish circle, but rather a garden-level double standard. Same result, however.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Morrison’s Healthy Response to Trauma

By Robin Bates | Published: October 6, 2025

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Tuesday

Yesterday, with Banned Books Week in mind, I surmised that rightwing book censors have been going after Stephen King’s novels because he voices dark truths about America that they would prefer to keep hidden. I can say the same about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which schools all around the country have been removing from libraries. Like King, Morrison delves into America’s long history of violence and the scars it has left on our collective psyche.

There’s a positive note here as well, however. Both authors believe that, in acknowledging and facing up to that history, we can begin to move past it. Unlike MAGA, they believe the only way past is through. Closing one’s eyes, on the other hand, just compounds the problem.

I taught both IT and Beloved in fantasy classes at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I taught King in my American Fantasy class, in which I identified a light strain and a dark strain of fantasy running through American literature. (There’s also a fantasy tradition in Native American literature, but that’s in a class by itself.) The light strain, originating in John Winthrop’s analogy of “American as a city on the hill,” would go on to include L. Frank Baum (who in The Wizard of Oz set out write a fairy tale without shadows) and Walt Disney. The dark strain, which could also be called the gothic strain, includes Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and King. At the core of gothic horror is Freud’s theory of the uncanny or spooky, where we repress our fears, only to see them return as monsters. (Freud called this “the return of the repressed”—or as the sci-film film Forbidden Planet  put it, “monsters from the id.”) As I noted yesterday, King dreams America’s nightmares.

Beloved, meanwhile, I once taught in a Magical Realism course, along with Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. In both courses I pointed out that fantasy, as Rushdie has noted, gives authors a special freedom in exploring volatile issues.

In IT, a group of children must battle with America’s dark id (personified by Pennywise the clown) and then, when they have forgotten all about the struggle, must battle with it again as adults. The one member of “the Losers Club” who does not forget is librarian Mike Hanlon, who acts as King’s avatar, finding connections between periodic explosions of violence. (Everyone else lives in blissful ignorance.) Hanlon calls the group back together when he realizes that Pennywise is preparing to attack again.

Hanlon is African American, the only person of color in the group, and I believe that King has made this choice because he sees African Americans as being particularly attuned to America’s long history of violence. Blacks remember when whites forget, in large part because the racism remains. Morrison’s Nobel-winning masterpiece bears this out.

I noted a week ago, in a post about Beloved and the famous “Scourged Back” photo from the Civil War, why right wingers have attacked Beloved. White supremacists don’t want Americans to be reading about the horrors of slavery, which could be so intense that they would drive a mother to kill her daughter. What they don’t realize is that King and Morrison both offer them a way out of the anger that is contorting their lives.

In battling with IT, the former child companions are not without resources as they face their fears. As children, they forged friendships across race, gender, class, and neurodiversity lines, forming a kind of mini American republic. In the end, they are saved by this companionship, along with their willingness and courage to grapple with their individual demons.

Morrison’s vision is more complex, but a major concern is the scars borne by African Americans over the trauma of slavery and of racism generally. Sethe is haunted by the child she killed, her lover Paul D is haunted by his own history as a slave, and Sethe’s living daughter Denver finds herself trapped in her mother’s guilt and sorrow. The haunting takes the form of the dead child returning as a ghost (Beloved) and holding them all in thrall.

By returning, however, Beloved also gives the characters the chance to revisit the trauma each has buried, and this proves to be the first step to moving past it. Through a community exorcism; through individual courage on the part of Denver (she first mothers her mother and then breaks from the family to live her own life); and through the love of Paul D for Sethe—he tells her that she herself is worthy of love and there’s a chance that she will believe him—the novel ends on a brighter note. We don’t have to remain forever stuck in the past.

Those who want to erase America’s long history of barbarism rather than facing it will remain stuck in a constant state of regression. It’s an empty way to live the precious life you have been given.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Stephen King Understands MAGA

By Robin Bates | Published: October 5, 2025
Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Monday

Harold Bloom once wrote that Edgar Allan Poe dreamed America’s nightmares, and what Poe did for the 19th century Stephen King has done for the second half of the 20th. Practitioners of the horror genre articulate dark truths that cultures wish to avoid, which is why their works simultaneously fascinate and repel audiences—which is why King is both the bestselling author of the past 50 years and also (at least in America) the most banned.

I choose to highlight King and book banning today, partly because Banned Books Week began yesterday and partly because I think that the political horrors that Americans witnessed this past week help us understand why King is so targeted. The horrors I have in mind are the invasions of Chicago and Portland by armed troops, the extrajudicial killings of Venezuelan boat crews, and Trump speaking of “the enemy within” to military generals and vilifying Democrats in a speech to Norfolk Navy folk. Hang on while I explain the connection with King.

First to some general facts about book banning. PEN America, the writers organization, has just reported on the latest figures:

Between July 2024 and June 2025, the fourth school year of the book ban crisis nationwide, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts. For the third straight year, Florida was the No. 1 state for book bans, with 2,304 instances of bans, followed by Texaswith 1,781 bans and Tennessee with 1,622. Together, PEN America reports nearly 23,000 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since 2021.

Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, has declared, “Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country.”

King leads the list, with 87 of his works affected. Florida alone has banned 23 of his books, leading the always blunt author to tweet, “What the f***!” and later, “May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book banners don’t always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit.”

King’s advice to young people, when they see their school libraries banning books, has long been, “Run to your public library, or the nearest bookstore, and read what it is your elders don’t want you to know.”

Seeking to understand why King leads the list, reviewer and crime novelist Michael J. Seidlinger believes that the author makes a point of “facing the uncomfortable side of society and humanity.” Rather than turn away from what we fear, he delves into the fear itself.

MAGA, like all authoritarian movements, is driven by fear: fear of change, fear of appearing weak, fear of women and minorities, fear of modernity generally. Demagogues like Trump play to these fears and can incite the fearful to acts of unimaginable violence. In IT, the King novel I know best, we see murderous violence unleashed against many groups that MAGA demonizes, including gay men, assertive wives, African Americans, racially mixed couples, the environment, and children.

I include children in my list because of ICE’s treatment of kids, not only in ripping them from parents but, in the Chicago raid, using zip ties. As political commentator Jay Quo describes it, agents from ICE, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), and the FBI

swarmed a residential building in Chicago, even dropping in from Black Hawk helicopters like some sort of special commandos going after dangerous terrorists. They indiscriminately broke into people’s apartments and yanked them from their beds. Some residents were naked. They ransacked apartments and even zip tied small children. Some U.S. citizens were detained for hours.

One neighbor, Eboni Watson, said that residents had to duck for cover as they heard flash bangs and then described what he witnessed:

They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,. That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, “f*** them kids.”

IT refers to the id, which is a derivation of the German word for “it” (“es”). Freud used it to designate our primal urges, which if not checked lead to barbarism. Throughout the novel, the homicidal clown Pennywise stands in for the id, and he not only commits horrors himself but incites mobs to do so. In one historical account, a town’s citizens take the law into their own hands and unleash hell on a group of bank robbers and their mistresses. As one witness remembers the incident,

It was all over in four, maybe five minutes, but it seemed a whole hell of a lot longer while it was happening. Petie and Al and Jimmy Gordon just sat there on the courthouse steps and poured bullets into the back end of the Chevrolet. I saw Bob Tanner down on one knee, firing and working the bold on that old rifle of his like a madman. Jagermeyer and Salle from under the theater marquee and Greg Cole stood in the gutter, hold that .45 automatic out in both hands, pulling the trigger just as fast as he could work it….There must have been fifty, sixty men firing all at once….When it was at its worst, it sounded like the Battle of the Marne. Windows were blown in by rifle-fire all around Machen’s.

Trump and his supporters fantasize about such bloodletting. He recently posted that, if Hamas doesn’t agree to his peace plan, they will experience “all HELL, like no one has ever seen before.” And while Vice President Vance jeers at the boats that have been blown up off the coast of Venezuela—“I wouldn’t go fishing right now”—Trump advisor Stephen Miller takes great pleasure in promising to “unleash” the police on inner city Memphis:

The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless. They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think that they’re tough. They have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore. We are so much more hardcore than they are, and we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us.”

We saw America’s id unleashed against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and, in addition to ICE brutality, we are seeing increasing instances of Americans throwing off prior restraint as they let their anger spill over. Between unaccountable law enforcement officials and easy access to guns, America is seeing civil society under assault in ways that remind southerners of the days when the KKK ran unchecked.

Stephen King shows us this ugly side of ourselves. No wonder his books get banned.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

The Miracle of Mustard Seed Faith

By Robin Bates | Published: October 4, 2025
Mustard tree

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Sunday

Today’s Gospel reading is the mustard seed parable as it appears in Luke. All three of the synoptic gospels have the story, and since Denise Levertov refers to them all in the poem below, I share the Luke and Mark versions for background. (The Matthew is almost identical to Mark’s):

First, Luke (17:5-6):

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

Now Mark (4:30-34):

And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

Mark then makes a distinction between poetry and expository prose (or right brain and left brain thinking):

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

After acknowledging that most of her readers will never have seen a mustard tree, she says that’s okay because we should focus on the small seed, not the big tree. She imagines the parable originating from Jesus walking through a wheat field, gleaning “intimate milky kernels, good/ to break on the tongue.” Then he downsizes his metaphor, moving from wheat kernel to mustard seed.

We get so hung up on how big the tree becomes—or on how faith is supposed to move mountains or feed multitudes—that we miss the paradox, the dramatic difference in size. The point is not that our faith is supposed to grow to become as big as a tree but that it initially appears to be as small and worthless as a speck of dust. It’s amazing that anything at all will come of it.

Stay small, she essentially counsels us. If we start from this humble premise, then we can appreciate the real miracle, which is how, from a tiny speck, our lives will begin to bloom. We ourselves will become a blossoming tree, providing a home for our soul. And not only for our own soul but for “a great concourse of birds/ at home there, wings among yellow flowers.”

What is the kingdom of God? It is this flowering self, what Yeats in “Among School Children” calls a “great rooted blossomer” swaying to music. The “kingdom of faith” awaits us, and although we have doubts—how could we not given how small and fragile our faith seems?—our task is to plant the seed.

On the Parables of the Mustard Seed
By Denise Levertov

Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
not a bird of the air in sight.

No, He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,

was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.

Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique —
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,

as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom

a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.
The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.
 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Old Wisdom from Jane Goodall (R.I.P.)

By Robin Bates | Published: October 2, 2025
Jane Goodall

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Friday

Primatologist Jane Goodall, who opened our eyes to the complexity of chimpanzees and so much more, died Wednesday at 91. As National Public Radio summed up her life,

While living among chimpanzees in Africa decades ago, Goodall documented the animals using tools and doing other activities previously believed to be exclusive to people, and also noted their distinct personalities. Her observations and subsequent magazine and documentary appearances in the 1960s transformed how the world perceived not only humans’ closest living biological relatives but also the emotional and social complexity of all animals, while propelling her into the public consciousness.

And then there’s this Goodall observation, made four years ago:

Out there in nature by myself, when you’re alone, you can become part of nature and your humanity doesn’t get in the way. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience when suddenly you hear different sounds and you smell different smells and you’re actually part of this amazing tapestry of life.

Goodall takes up this theme in “The Old Wisdom,” written (I believe) in 2014. One can’t read her advice to “go out and seek your soul” without thinking how she herself went out into the wilds of Tanzania—the Gombe Stream National Park—to study chimpanzee communities. In doing so, discovered “the Eternal I.”

The Old Wisdom
By Jane Goodall

When the night wind makes the pine trees creak
And the pale clouds glide across the dark sky,
Go out my child, go out and seek
Your soul: The Eternal I.

For all the grasses rustling at your feet
And every flaming star that glitters high
Above you, close up and meet
In you: The Eternal I.

Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow
And silent, comprehending all, and by and by
Your soul, the Universe, will know
Itself: the Eternal I.

I like how one has to read line three of the second stanza twice, first as a continuation of the second line but then in conjunction with what follows in the third. The star glitters “high above you” but then “above you” can be joined to the contrasting “close up,” so that the two “meet in you.” This joining of the vast and the small, flaming star and “grasses rustling at your feet,” reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

I am also put in mind of the final lines of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Each and All”:

As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pinecones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Goodall yielded herself to the perfect whole and, in the process, discovered the Eternal I, both in herself and in all of us.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

  • Sign up for my weekly newsletter

  • Buy Now
  • Learn More
  • Buy Now
  • Learn More