Carter Foresaw Algorithm Manipulation

By Robin Bates | Published: August 10, 2025

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Monday

Today I return to a post I wrote on Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of  Doctor Hoffman a year and a half ago—which itself was a repost from the first Trump presidency—because it’s becoming increasingly applicable with every passing day. A Substack post by Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral science researcher at the University of Maryland, warns that the Trump administration is manipulating the algorithms used by social media.

Since many Americans get their news and opinions from social media, and since controlling the narrative is a key part of politics (which is why students need to study literature), this is a significant development. Orr Bueno calls such manipulation “reverse algorithmic capture,” which she describes as 

a process through which government pressure reshapes the architecture of digital platforms, not by direct control, but by engineering incentives that guide algorithms to amplify preferred narratives and suppress dissent. Put differently, it’s the state using soft power to realign platforms’ invisible gates toward ideological conformity—but never giving up that element of distance and plausible deniability.

Orr Bueno notes that this strategy “does not need to issue censorship orders or serve warrants to Silicon Valley tycoons.” That’s because it works “by shifting the terrain on which digital gatekeeping occurs.”

Reverse algorithmic capture is a far more subtle form of control than the example I discussed back in January of 2024, when we saw a Democratic rival to Biden use Artificial Intelligence to create fake robo-calls. That appears child’s play compared with this.

I predicted in my 2024 post that, if Trump were reelected, Carter’s account of a “downward-dropping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape” would continue to, well, spiral downward. And so, to our horror, it has.

Carter wrote her novel in 1973, when the left-leaning counterculture was engaged in its own assault on norms and conventions. It’s darkly ironic that the anarchy that certain leftists embraced back then is now besieging us from the right.

Reprinted from January 24, 2024

Of the many potential dangers posed by Artificial Intelligence, it appears that one may involve messing with elections. During the recently completed New Hampshire primary, a Boston University professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies reports AI being used to fake a Joe Biden robo-call to potential voters. Joan Donovan writes that the call urged Democrats not to participate in the GOP’s January 23 primary election.

New Hampshire is one of those states where voters have opportunities to cross party lines to vote, and Trump was worried about liberals voting for Trump’s opponent Nikki Haley to keep him from getting his party’s nomination. Donovan explains, “In a media ecosystem full of noise, scrambled signals such as deep fake robocalls make it virtually impossible to tell facts from fakes.”

Apparently, all one need to in creating a fake robocall is

selecting a politician, celebrity or executive like Joe Biden, Donald Trump or Elon Musk from a menu and typing a script of what you want them to appear to say, and the website creates the deepfake automatically. Though the audio and video output is usually choppy and stilted, when the audio is delivered via a robocall it’s very believable. You could easily think you are hearing a recording of Joe Biden, but really it’s machine-made misinformation.

Three years ago, as we saw Trump use his stolen election lie to regain control over his party, I noted that Angela Carter has written a novel in which fake reality sweeps aside all resistance. Since the situation has gotten even worse as close to 70% of Republicans now think that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected.

I once taught The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1973) in a British fantasy class and found it so unpleasant that I vowed never to assign it again. Now, however, it has the ring of truth. The villain is the 19th century German author E.T.A. Hoffman, who wrote The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and other works of fantasy and gothic horror. In Carter’s novel, Hoffman is the creator of city-wide illusions. Once he gets to work, no one can tell what is real and what is fake.

The changes start imperceptibly, just as Trumpian reality did. Narrator Desiderio, who believes in Reason, is one of the first people to notice

how the shadows began to fall subtly awry and a curious sense of strangeness invaded everything….And the Doctor started his activities in very small ways. Sugar tasted a little salty, sometimes. A door one had always seen to be blue modulated by scarcely perceptible stages until, suddenly, it was a green door.

When the unreality plague is at its height, anything is possible. Here’s a small sampling:

The sense of space was powerfully affected so that sometimes the proportions of buildings and townscapes swelled to enormous, ominous sizes or repeated themselves over and over again in a fretting infinity. But this was much less disturbing than the actual objects which filled these gigantesque perspectives. Often in vaulted architraves of railway stations, women in states of pearly, heroic nudity, their hair elaborately coiffed in the stately chignons of the fin de siècle, might be seen parading beneath their parasols as serenely as if they had been in the Bois de Boulogne…Sometimes the river ran backwards and crazy fish jumped out to flop upon the sidewalks and wriggle around on their bellies for a while until they died…It was, too, the heyday of trompe l’oeil for painted forms took advantage of the liveliness they mimicked. Horses from the pictures of Stubbs in the Municipal Art Gallery neighed, tossed their manes and stepped delicately off their canvases to go crop the grass in public parks. A plump Bacchus wearing only a few grapes strayed from a Titian into a bar and there instituted Dionysiac revelry.

Will this doesn’t sound too bad, there are darker illusions as well:

Frequently, imaginary massacres filled the gutters with blood and, besides, the cumulative psychological effect of all these distortions, combined with the dislocation of everyday life and the hardship of privations we began to suffer, created a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of profound melancholy. It seemed each one of us was trapped in some downward-dropping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape. Many committed suicide.

“Downward-dropping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape” pretty much describes what presidency under Trump felt like and what we could expect again were he to be reelected.

At one point in the battle to hold on to a determined reality, the city’s Minister of Determination worries that illusions of past mistresses will lure real people into impregnating them, thereby creating “a generation of half-breed ghosts [that] would befoul the city even more.” I think of those once reasonable Republicans who have interbred with Trump’s fantasies, thereby rendering themselves unrecognizable.

The narrator, like many of us gazing in horror at what Trump’s grotesque lying has done to America, describes reacting with a mixture of fascination and dread:

Then, we—that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not—felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice. We found ourselves holding our breath almost in expectancy, as though we might stand on the threshold of a great event, transfixed in the portentous moment of waiting, although inwardly we were perturbed since this new, awesome, orchestration of time and space which surrounded us might be only the overture to something else, to some most profoundly audacious of all these assaults against the things we had always known.

Hoffman’s infernal desire machines, it turns out, operate by mechanistically tapping into our inexhaustible “eroto-energy,” thereby creating images that we cannot resist. While this means that, on one level, our dreams come true, it’s also the case that we are no more than Pavlovian dogs. Hoffman has but to mix some sights, sounds and colors, ring a bell, and we salivate. In fact, he (unlike Trump) becomes weary of his project, even though it brings him immense power. The narrator observes, “I would have hated him less if he had been less bored with his inventions.”

Conservative Never Trumper Tom Nichols has described America as “an unserious nation threatened by millions of spoiled, stupid adult children,” and I wonder if Carter’s novel gets at this reality. (Being English, she could also be getting at the fantasies that prompted large numbers of Brits to vote against their well-being and for Brexit.) Desiring their fantasies, large portions of the American electorate thrill to Trump tickling their pleasure centers, and even though he resorts to the same tired act over and over, for some it works every time.

Maybe this is a rich country problem, where bored people (some of whom flew their planes to Washington to participate in the January 6 insurrection) seek thrills to give their lives meaning. Why settle for mere technocratic competence when you can get a show every day? Whereas Joe Biden listens to scientists and tries to get everyone vaccinated, Trump and his cult tout bleach and ivermectin and conspiracy theories and the thrill of flaunting death.

These spoiled, stupid adult children, unlike actual children, have a fully developed frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex (responsible for the executive function), which means they have no excuse. Sadly, it appears that you only have to tell them what they want to hear and they’ll follow you anywhere.

In the novel, there are only two characters who have a fighting chance against Hoffman—Desiderio, whose imagination is balanced with his love of Reason, and the Minister of Determination, who has no imagination at all, being a colorless bureaucrat who believes in order. While Trump riled up those with vivid imaginations, his coup attempt was thwarted by a number of Republicans who were no more than good bureaucrats. It was secretaries of state and election supervisors that saved our democracy by simply running a matter-of-fact election.

Unfortunately, Trump and his followers are trying to unseat them, replacing them with people who are susceptible to the former president’s infernal desire machines. Trump’s eroto-energy has enough of a hold over enough Republicans that future elections are in doubt.

In the novel, Desiderio triumphs, although only barely, and we should all hope that, between Enlightenment Reason and bureaucratic competence, we will defeat Trumpism. But I worry that, because a technocrat like Joe Biden can’t put on a Trump-like show, maybe some of his drop in popularity is attributable to nostalgia for the circus of the last administration. As I look back at 2016-20, I relate to Desiderio looking back at the days when Hoffman’s desire machines ran unchecked:

In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualized desire, I myself had only the one desire. And that was, for everything to stop.

I became a hero only because I survived. I survived because I could not surrender to the flux of mirages. I could not merge and blend with them; I could not abnegate my reality and lose myself forever as others did, blasted to non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason.

We’ve been bombarded by this ferocious artillery for some time, and now, with AI entering the scene, it appears that it will get even worse. Professor Donovan, like Desiderio, is hoping that Reason and our version of the Ministry of Determination will prevail. We must, he says, “learn to venerate what I call TALK: timely, accurate, local knowledge. I believe that it’s important to design social media systems that value timely, accurate, local knowledge over disruption and divisiveness.” He also wants federal and state law enforcement authorities to vigorously investigate any use of technology to suppress voter turnout.

 As an Enlightenment project, America has always found itself besieged by the forces of unreason. Educators everywhere must be on high alert.

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How Shelley Helps Me Envision God

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2025
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Sunday

I am no theologian and so can’t speak systematically about what God is, but that doesn’t mean that my mind doesn’t grapple with the question. Carl Sagan once observed that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on earth, and while that couldn’t possibly be true, it does help get at the immensity of what we are talking about. Just as the universe is not only bigger than we think but bigger than we can think, so God is bigger than even that. 

But if this is so, how can we imagine that God cares about us? After all, compared to the universe, we are so infinitesimally tiny as to practically not exist. “Not one sparrow will fall to earth without your father’s care,” Jesus assures us in Matthew 10:29, which means that the impossibly large and the impossibly small are somehow bound together. How can this be?

Percy Bysshe Shelley comes as close to resolving this conundrum for me as anyone. Although Shelley was famously kicked out of Oxford for co-authoring a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity Atheism,” in his poem Adonais he talks of “the One Spirit,” which could just as well be called God. In Shelley’s eyes, the One Spirit

Sweeps through the dull dense world; compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th’ unwilling dross, that checks its flight,
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the heaven’s light.

If one sees creation as the process of the One Spirit blowing through matter—“torturing th’ unwilling dross”—so that new forms are created, then one has an image of how large and small interact. Shelley says that this Power “wields the world with never wearied love,/ Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.”

Dante articulates a version of this vision in the Divine Comedy, beginning with humans who are locked in the hell of self but ending with the celestial rose of Paradiso, where the poet is able to envision, through specially granted insight, the whole universe being driven by “the love that moves the sun and the stars.”

I had a vision of the One Spirit at work during our church’s Adult Forum this past year, which had nature as its focus. As different experts talked about different dimensions of the natural world and our natural bodies, each astounding in its creative complexity, I thought of the God of Genesis looking at creation and seeing that it was good. I felt the same as one of my reading groups discussed Richard Power’s The Overstory and then, this past week, Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. What formerly I had seen as a “green smudge” (Schlanger’s phrase) now seems infused with, well, the One Spirit.

Since Adonais is a poem about the death of a great poet, Shelley focuses on how the One Spirit produces beauty. In lines that we had engraved on our eldest son’s grave, Shelley writes,

He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird.
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…

In other words, Keats is a particular sensitive receiver of the One Spirit; he is dross that comes as close as dross ever can to capturing the beauty and enchantment of that Spirit. Our interactions with nature are heightened by his poems like “Ode to a Nightinggale,” just as they are by, say, the Hudson Valley painters or Beethoven in his Pastoral Symphony. 

As he mourns Keats, Shelley is somewhat consoled by the idea that his friend is being reunited with this energy source: “He is a portion of the loveliness/ Which once he made more lovely.” If this is true, then there is no final death because we are all part of the eternal Spirit. “The One remains, the many change and pass;/ Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly,” Shelley writes, and then elsewhere,

The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. 

Shelley, in short, comes close to answering the question that has triggered this post. So does the Book of Job, in which the suffering Job expresses his anguished sense that he has been abandoned by God. God responds with a version of Shelley’s One Spirit: while not catering specifically to the individual tragedies of infinitesimally small beings, God is nevertheless present in our lives. Somewhat sarcastically God asks Job,

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
    Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
    Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
    or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
    and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

While I didn’t think of either Shelley or Job when we lost Justin, I remember thinking of God in these terms. I didn’t blame God because I didn’t think that God interacted with us in this particular way. Rather, I saw God as presenting me with a way out of perpetual gloom. I could embrace the One Spirit and open myself to its light, even at the darkest of times.

I couldn’t do this all at once, nor does Shelley. The early parts of Adonais are filled with with his despair at Keats’s death. But he has faith that a greater force is at work in our lives, and that faith gave me something to rally around. 

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To Counter Moral Collapse, Read Pratchett

By Robin Bates | Published: August 8, 2025

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Friday

In addition to listening to Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam on our way to and from Maine (I wrote about this on Monday), Julia and I enjoyed his Shepherd’s Crown. The novel is the last in his young adult series about teenage witch Tiffany Aching and the last book he wrote before succumbing to Alzheimer’s and death. In this work we see Tiffany step into adulthood and assume unofficial leadership of the witch community.

I write about it today because I think Pratchett provides one answer to an urgent question raised by fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat. In an essay written this past March, the New York University historian asked what we can do to address America’s current moral collapse. As she depicts our situation,

We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.

To advance their project, Ben-Ghiat writes, authoritarians cultivate and reward at state she calls “moral deregulation,” which she says is

a rolling back of civic and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others. Democratic societies inculcate such norms in schools, religious spaces, workplaces, and other social institutions and networks. Authoritarian takeovers mean such norms are discredited and dismantled. 

Good literature pushes back against authoritarianism, and there’s a special place for quality young adult literature in this battle. Although schools may not assign Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series, many students become enthralled with Pratchett’s comic fantasy world when they encounter it, sometimes reading all 41 of his Discworld novels. A work like Shepherd’s Crown emphasizes the importance of working selflessly and tirelessly on behalf of the larger community, even as our country’s leaders embrace unbridled greed, glorify empty glitz, and betray the Constitution, religious principles, and foundational social norms.

The characters who embody this corrupt ethos in Shepherd’s Crown are the elves. The witches who oppose them, on the other hand, devote their lives to healing the sick, delivering babies, negotiating disputes, and sometimes even trimming the toenails of elderly persons who can’t accomplish the task themselves.

I mentioned in my previous post that Pratchett in certain ways defines himself against Tolkien, even while owing him a great debt, and one sees this rebellion in his depiction of elves. Tolkien, of course, idealized elves, so much so that his fellow Inkling Hugo Dyson said—this when Tolkien was reading aloud a draft chapter from Lord of the Rings to the Oxford writing group–“Oh fuck, not another elf!”

Though Pratchett’s elves, like Tolkien’s, are beautiful and enchanting, in Pratchett this is just a façade that they use to disarm humans. In actuality, they are self-centered, sadistic beings who love to play cruel jokes and who tease their enemies before torturing and killing them. They do so, however, while looking like this:

[The queen] had chosen to sparkle today. The everlasting sunlight shining through the exquisitely carved stone windows had been pitched exactly to strike the tiny gems on her wings so that delicate rainbows of light danced around d the audienc ehcamber as she moved.

And this:

When Tiffany got back, Nightshade took the healing ointment, and it seemed as if with each smooth stroke the little elf blossomed, becoming more and more beautiful. There was a sparkle about her and it was like a syrup that covered everything. It shouted, “Am I not beautiful? Am I not clever? I am the Queen of Queens”

 To which Tiffany, who has been expecting this attack, screams, “You will not put your glamour on me, elf!”

The glamour proves to be a potent weapon, however—just as it can be in our own society—and the elves use it to undermine the self-esteem and the self-belief of their enemies, after which they chop them into pieces. In the novel they have the chance do so following the death of Granny Weatherwax, the powerful witch who has been guarding the border between fairy land and Discworld. Tiffany, who is to take her place, does not yet have her self-confidence, but we watch as she comes into her own. At one point she finds herself dealing with Nightshade, the former queen of the elves, who has been ousted in a palace coup, had her wings torn off, and cast almost dead into Discworld.

Tiffany instructs this amoral being into how to get along with others. Such is the state of our times that the witch’s advocacy of empathy reads like an attack on current government policy. (Recall that Elon Musk said that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”) Here’s one of their interchanges:

“I have been watching humans,” said Nightshade as they were clumping back up the road. “And I can’t understand them. I saw a woman giving an old tramp a couple of pennies. He was nothing to do with her, so why would she do that? How does it help her? I don’t understand.”

“It’s what we do,” said Tiffany. “The wizards call it empathy. That means putting yourself in the place of the other person and seeing the world from their point of view. 

As for what the old lady gets in return, Tiffany responds,

Well, she will probably feel what we call a little glow, because she has helped someone who needed help. It will mean that she is glad that she is not in his circumstances. You could say that she can see what his world is like, and—what can I say?—she comes away feeling hopeful.”

Nightshade counters with an argument that the right is currently using to strip people of their Medicaid benefits:

“But the tramp looked as if he could do a job of some sort, to earn his own pennies, but nevertheless she gave him hers.

Tiffany replies, “Well, yes, that sort of thing does happen, but not always, and the old lady will still feel she has done the right thing. He may be a bit of a scamp, but she tells herself that she is a good person.

Tiffany concludes this discussion by talking about why it’s better to work with people rather than use one’s superior power (magic in her case) to force them to do things. “We humans definitely need other people to keep us human,” she says, and then,

“Well, what we witches have found is that power is best left at home. Magic is tricky anyway, and it can turn and twist and get things wrong. But if you surround yourself with other humans, you will have what we call friends—people who like you, and people you like. 

Over the ages, she notes, kings have learned to rule by consent—“we like having them as rulers, if they do what we want them to do”—and notes that kings and people both eventually realized “that it was better to work peacefully with everyone else.”

The queen of the elves eventually comes around, but I seriously doubt if Trump and his minions ever well. Instead, like Pratchett’s elves, Trump uses glamor as a weapon, taking people who look good on television and making them as cabinet officials. Figures like Department of Justice head Pam Bondi, Homeland Security director Kristi Noem, Department of Defense Director Pete Hegseth, and White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt may be beautiful on the outside, but each is working assiduously to demonize Trump’s enemies and promote his authoritarian agenda.

In such an environment, how do we get young people to value (to borrow from Wordsworth) the “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love” that comprise “the best portion of a good man’s life”? How do we encourage them to pursue a life of service over one of grift and corruption? Compelling characters like Tiffany Aching, who invite emulation, can play a vital role.

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To Mark Hiroshima Day, a Plea for Peace

By Robin Bates | Published: August 6, 2025
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

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Thursday

Eighty years ago yesterday the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, marking a new stage in humankind’s destructive capabilities. My father, who was in occupied Munich at the time as an interpreter for the Third Army, told me about the effect it had on him. His job was taking German citizens on required tours through Dachau—America wanted to show them what their country had done—but after Hiroshima the Germans attempted to turn the moral tables. “You say that we were bad…” they said accusingly. As an impressionable 22-year-old, my father was shattered and became, at that moment, a lifelong pacifist.

To mark the day, here’s the poem “Hiroshima Child” by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. The speaker, a child who has died in Hiroshima, returns to beg us to stop the killing. In the poem’s simplicity lies its power.

Hiroshima Child

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead

I’m only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I’m seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play

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Pratchett on the Excitement of Invention

By Robin Bates | Published: August 5, 2025

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Wednesday

Last week I reported on visiting the site where the du Pont family made their fortune in gunpowder. They also have a great museum there celebrating inventors, although upon reflection I think it may be in part a public relations move. Better to be seen as a Thomas Edison or a George Washington Carver than a merchant of death. 

It so happens that, while visiting the museum, Julia and I were also listening to Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam, which has the same celebratory feel. Although it’s a fantasy novel, Pratchett taps into the excitement that gripped 19th century England over the invention of the railway, with his engineer hero Dick Simnel harnessing steam to create “Iron Girder.” Eventually the train is involved in a heroic and hair-raising mission to thwart an attempted coup by fundamentalist dwarfs, who have been blowing up telegraph towers and massacring innocents. (Pratchett has modeled them on Islamic State terrorists.)

Pratchett’s engineer exudes the same drive and inventiveness that we saw highlighted at the museum. Working in his garage (of course), he convinces his skeptical mother by waving in front of her “something that looked like a small wand, which might have been made for a miniature wizard”:

This’ll keep me safe, Mother! I’ve the knowing of the sliding rule! I can tell the sine what to do, and the cosine likewise and work out the tangent of t’quaderatics!

A little later, recalling a father who has been killed in an explosion, Simnel tells her,

I remembered what Dad said about t’time he were watching t’kettle boiling and notice t’lid going up and down with the pressure, and he told me that one day someone would build a bigger kettle that would lift more than a kettle lid. And I believe I have the knowing of the way to build a proper kettle, Mother.

We then watch Simnel persuade millionaire Harry King to invest in Iron Girder. The engineer says, with justifiable pride, “I’ve made a machine that can carry people and goods just about everywhere and it don’t need ’orses and it’s run on water ’n’ coal. It’s my machine, I built it and I can make it even better if you can see your way clear to advance me some investment.”

Although a tight-fisted man who has made his fortune handling the city’s sewage, King is entranced when he sees Iron Girder steaming down a short circle track laid down for demonstration purposes:

Harry was uncharacteristically silent. The thrumming of the machines was like a kind of spell. Again, the metal voice of steam rang out over the compound like a lost soul and he found himself unable to leave. Harry wasn’t a man for introspection and all that rubbish, but he thought that this, well this was something worth a closer look. And then he noticed the faces of the crowd around the compound, the goblins climbing up to gawp at this new raging devil which was nevertheless under the control of two lads in flat caps and very little to speak of in regard to teeth.

Like the du Ponts, who shifted from gunpowder to nylon, King (to the joy of his wife) shifts from being “the King of Shit” to a major backer of the new technology.

Terry Pratchett has sometimes been seen as an anti-Tolkien, in that his own fantasy world has made peace with the industrial age and also embraces multicultural diversity. Tolkien, who understandably longed for a pre-industrial rural England as he experienced the horrors of World War I trench warfare, casts Saruman as a diabolical tree-destroying industrialist and the goblins and orcs as the industrial proletariat. DEI advocate Pratchett, by contrast, shows goblins gaining the grudging respect of society as they prove indispensable to social progress. 

Whereas Tolkien depicts goblins as little more than vermin, which is how the public sees them in Pratchett’s novel Snuff, Pratchett shows them possessing special talents. In fact, by the end of the novel, a goblin has invented the bicycle. Discworld society eventually grants them rights, along with trolls, dwarfs, werewolves, vampires (but they must be black ribbon members who have sworn off human blood), and other storybook monsters.

These other creatures are also contributing to the railway. For instance, Troll lawyer Thunderbolt, who has a voice “like gently flowing lava,” whose body is as hard as a rock, and who carries “a rich plant life in his visible cavities,” handles the necessary patent applications. “I am diamond through and through and therefore I cannot tell lies for fear of shattering,’ he informs his clients.

From the Hagley Museum we learned the importance of patents and the patent office in the invention process.

When reading Raising Steam, one can help thinking of Trump’s attacks on immigrants. Pratchett may be targeting Muslim fundamentalists in his novel, but the fanaticism of terrorist dwarfs who want to return their kingdom to the old days applies just as much to those MAGA Americans who want to make America white again.

What both Pratchett and the Hagley Museum make clear is that new inventions arise from individuals exercising their freedom to follow their dreams. In other words, the more a society opens its arms to diversity and to individual initiative, the more it will thrive. It’s why independent university research and a broad-minded immigration policy are critical to social health.

Pratchett strikes a feminist blow as well. By the end of the novel we learn that the dwarf king who restores order and who has reached historic accords with the dwarfs’ traditional enemies (trolls and goblins) is actually female.

After defeating the fundamentalist dwarfs and regaining her kingdom, the queen concludes with the kind of rousing speech we need from our leaders today. Referring to the historic train ride that has allowed her to return home in time to put down the rebellion, she declares,

What a voyage that was! And the wonderful discovery of loggysticks [logistics]. The train is the future, bringing people closer together. Think about it. People run to see the train go past. Why? Because it’s heading to the future or coming from the past. Personally, I very much want the future and I want to see to it that dwarfs are part of that future, if it’s not too late. 

When it comes to 21st century challenges, millions of Americans also want to be part of the future, not trapped in MAGA nostalgia. We’re currently on our own daring train ride, battling those who want to derail it with landslides, sabotage, and direct attacks.

And with this battle in mind, it’s worth mentioning another Pratchett character since he can serve as a model in these dark times. “A life without danger is a life not world living,” proclaims Moist von Lipwig, a former conman who has used his skills to reform the postal system (Going Postal), get the central bank back up and running (Making Money) and now ensure the success of the railway. While he claims he wants a dull, comfortable life, he brings excitement to making basic governmental services work.

In other words, we can’t take for granted the life we’ve been accustomed to. We must tap into those energies of the past that made our country great and renew our commitment, even if doing so requires us to be dedicated, risk-taking, and courageous.

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Are You an Eeyore Democrat? Shake It Off

By Robin Bates | Published: August 4, 2025
E.H. Shepard, illus. from House at Pooh Corner

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Tuesday

The donkey is the Democratic icon, but some are worrying that the donkey Democrats most resemble these days is Eeyore. At least, that’s the comparison made by political commentator Matt Labash in a recent essay posted on his Substack blog Slack Tide. 

Challenging those he calls “Eeyore Democrats,” he writes, “Yes, we know you’re a sad donkey–fight harder anyway.”

Is it useful to characterize Democrats as such? First, here’s Labash explaining how he arrived at the comparison:

But there’s one thing that’s fatiguing me even more than the physical weather, and that’s the political climate. For it’s hard to go five minutes these days without some defeated sad sack reminding you that no matter how awful Donald Trump’s first six months have been — no matter how much his ever-shifting tariffs are jacking prices to hell, no matter how many academic and media institutions he shakes down for extortion booty, no matter how many bribes he takes in plain sight from memecoin dinners/private-jet-donating-foreign governments, no matter how many idiot offspring strike lucrative deals abroad trading off his name, no matter how much he coddes the pedophiles he was supposed to wreak havoc against, no matter how many billionaire sociopaths he appoints to destroy basic government functionality, no matter how out-of-touch he is with common-man concerns while pretending to be their champion, no matter how hard he sodomizes the republic on a near-daily basis — well, Democrats have the real credibility problem.

To which Labash responds that for Democrats to blame fellow Dems for the current dysfunction “is like blaming my overtaxed AC condenser for the swamp-ass DMV temperatures. It’s a misappropriation of ire.”

I went rummaging through Winnie-the-Pooh and House at Pooh Corner to determine whether the Eeyore comparison is apt. I think people become Eeyores when they feel unappreciated. But knowing that they’re supposed to be stoic and not complain, they vent through passive-aggressive outbursts, pretending to shrug off their hurt. They’re like Eeyore informing Christopher Robin that maybe it’s actually no big deal that someone has stolen his house in the middle of the winter. After observing that he thought he had shelter, he continues on, “But I suppose I don’t. After all, we can’t all have houses.”

And then:

And I said to myself: The others will be sorry if I’m getting myself all cold. They haven’t got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake, and they don’t Think, but if it goes on snowing for another six weeks or so, one of them will begin to say to himself: ‘Eeyore can’t be so very much too Hot about three o’clock in the morning.’ And then it will Get About. And they’ll be Sorry.

In another story, Eeyore is similarly upset that everyone has forgotten his birthday. Rather than express his complaint directly, however, he says what really bothers him is that everyone else will be miserable:

“It’s bad enough,” said Eeyore, almost breaking down, “being miserable myself, what with no presents and no cake and no candles, and no proper notice taken of me at all, but if everybody else is going to be miserable too—-”

Eeyore is fortunate that he has friends who come to his aid—who build him a house and find his tail and bring him birthday gifts and get him out of the water. Most of the Democrats I know spend much of their lives helping others, which is why so many go into teaching and government and non-profits.

So how about this? You’re allowed to wallow for a few moments in Eeyore-style self-pity when those whose lives you’re seeking to improve demonize you while voting for Trump. Take a few moments to feel sorry for yourself.

But knowing that such wallowing quickly becomes tiresome, quickly shake it off and join the crew of Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin and even Rabbit, who are determined to help other people. And who do so without worrying about being thanked

After all, selfless actions bring about a more fulfilling life. Pooh and Piglet feel the happiness of Habitat for Humanity volunteers as they work on Eeyore’s house:

“We’ve finished our house!” sang the gruff voice.
“Tiddely pom!” sang the squeak one.
“It’s a beautiful HOUSE…”
“Tiddely pom . . .”

J.D. Vance complained that Ukraine never properly thanked the U.S. for weapons and Trump complained that starving Gazans never thanked him for food donations. But for Pooh and Piglet, the fact that Eeyore never knows what they have done for him and never thanks them is irrelevant.

People will not necessarily thank you for working to save democracy. Do it anyway.

Tiddely pom.

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Killing the Messenger of Bad News

By Robin Bates | Published: August 3, 2025
Lecomte du Nouÿ, The Bearers of Bad News

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Monday

One mark of a tyrant is killing those who bring bad news, which Donald Trump has just metaphorically done with the head of the Department of Labor Statistics. When Erika McEntarfer reported a sharp slowdown in May and June’s hiring numbers, Donald Trump responded, “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY.”

No one outside Trump sycophants believe that McEntarfer has done anything other than report the facts. The move has shaken even those staunch Trump supporters who are in the business community. After all, they rely on objective government figures in their decision making. Many have noted that this is an action reminiscent of authoritarian leaders in third world countries.

There’s a long historical tradition of killing the messenger. In Parallel Lives (c. 100 AD), Greek historian Plutarch records an instance of the Armenian king Tigranes the Great punishing a bearer of bad news:

The first messenger that gave notice of Lucullus’s coming was so far from pleasing Tigranes, that he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man daring to bring further information, without any intelligence at all, Tigranes sat while war was already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him…

The upshot was that Tigranes lost several key battles to the Romans and found his kingdom eventually reduced to a client state.

My favorite instance of a messenger worried about delivering bad news occurs in Euripides’s The Bacchae. He has just witnessed the king’s mothers and aunts going full Bacchae—they’ve ripped apart a herd of cattle—but he wants full assurance that he won’t pay a price for conveying the news:

I saw those women in their Bacchic revels,
those sacred screamers, all driven crazy,
the ones who run barefoot from their homes.
I came, my lord, to tell you and the city
the dreadful things they’re doing, their actions
are beyond all wonder. But, my lord,
first I wish to know if I should tell you,
openly report what’s going on up there,
or whether I should hold my tongue.                           
Your mood changes so fast I get afraid—                                        
your sharp spirit, your all-too-royal temper.

Fortunately for him, King Pentheus is no Tigranes or Donald Trump, at least upon this occasion. Pentheus claims he wants to hear the truth, no matter how unpleasant:

Speak on. Whatever you have to report,
you’ll get no punishment at all from me.
It’s not right to vent one’s anger on the just.
The more terrible the things you tell me
about those Bacchic women, the worse
I’ll move against the one who taught them
all their devious tricks.

Hotspur’s father in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 agrees that messengers shouldn’t be blamed. In this instance, the messenger doesn’t have to plead for himself since Northumberland recognizes the situation:

Yet, for all this, say not that Percy’s dead.
I see a strange confession in thine eye:
Thou shakest thy head and hold’st it fear or sin
To speak a truth. If he be slain, say so;
The tongue offends not that reports his death:
And he doth sin that doth belie the dead,
Not he which says the dead is not alive.

Yet for all that, he acknowledges that this messenger will forever be tainted:

Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office, and his tongue
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,
Remember’d tolling a departing friend.

The leader that most resembles Trump is Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Here she is threatening the messenger that brings news that Antony has married Octavia:

What say you? Hence,

Strikes him again

Horrible villain! or I’ll spurn thine eyes
Like balls before me; I’ll unhair thy head:

She hales him up and down

Thou shalt be whipp’d with wire, and stew’d in brine,
Smarting in lingering pickle.

Despite the messenger’s protest—“Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match”—Cleopatra threatens to go after him with a knife. Yet even she proves superior to Trump since eventually she is brought to reason, observing she is degrading herself by threatening the man:

These hands do lack nobility, that they strike
A meaner than myself; since I myself
Have given myself the cause.

So although she is still spouting fire when she sends the messenger away, she at least insists on hearing what he has to say. Oh, and she doesn’t kill him.

Trump, by contrast, does the metaphorical equivalent of shooting the messenger. Thank goodness he doesn’t have the authority to do so literally.

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Worldly Vanity vs. Celestial Wisdom

By Robin Bates | Published: August 2, 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.

Sunday

Today’s Hebrew Scriptures reading is the famous “vanity of vanities” passage from Ecclesiastes, supposedly written by King Solomon. The observation that “all is vanity” inspired Samuel Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, his greatest poem. It’s a devastating satire that points out how our endless pursuit of wealth and power fails to bring us happiness. 

First, here’s an excerpt the reading: 

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14)

Vanity of Human Wishes is too long to share in its entirety so I’ve just picked out some of the highlights. Lest you become overwhelmed by the grim picture that Johnson paints, I promise you a happy ending.

The poem begins with the poet surveying the entirety of humankind and finding everywhere the same anxious toil and ceaseless strife:

Let observation with extensive view, 
Survey mankind, from China to Peru; 
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, 
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; 
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, 
O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate…

Some of the passages apply directly to those who are willing to sell out American democracy to line their pockets:

How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, 
Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice, 
How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress’d, 
When vengeance listens to the fool’s request. 

And:

But scarce observed, the knowing and the bold, 
Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold; 
Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined, 
And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws, 
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws; 
Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, 
The dangers gather as the treasures rise. 

Johnson pours out special scorn upon those who seek to attach themselves to the rich and powerful. He has his own version of “Everything Trump Touches Dies,” Rick Wilson’s observation that everyone who hitches his or her wagon to the man is destroyed:

Unnumber’d suppliants crowd Preferment’s gate, 
Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great; 
Delusive Fortune hears the incessant call, 
They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall. 
On ev’ry stage the foes of peace attend, 
Hate dogs their flight, and insult mocks their end.

Johnson doesn’t only focus on those who sell their souls for earthly gain. Even good people will experience unhappiness as they learn that “all is vanity.” “Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,” he asks, “roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?”

Not necessarily, he reassures us. After all, we still have prayer:

Inquirer, cease, petitions yet remain,  
Which heaven may hear, nor deep religion vain.
Still raise for good the supplicating voice, 
But leave to heaven the measure and the choice.  

In other words, pray but don’t attempt to dictate how the prayer is to be answered. Rather, put yourself into the hands of God:

Implore his aid, in his decisions rest, 
Secure whate’er he gives, he gives the best. 

What should we pray for? Johnson provides a list: 

Pour forth thy fervors for a healthful mind, 
Obedient passions, and a will resigned; 
For love, which scarce collective man can fill; 
For patience, sov’reign o’er transmuted ill; 
For faith, that panting for a happier seat, 
Counts death kind nature’s signal of retreat…

With these, we may in the end find the happiness that cannot be achieved through wealth and power. John concludes,

These goods for man the laws of heaven ordain, 
These goods he grants, who grants the pow’r to gain; 
With these celestial wisdom calms the mind, 
And makes the happiness she does not find.

When he speaks of “celestial wisdom,” Johnson may have in mind the figure of Wisdom (Sophia) in Proverbs, who is personified as a woman who “calls aloud in the street” and who loves those

who love me,
    and those who seek me find me.
With me are riches and honor,
    enduring wealth and prosperity.
My fruit is better than fine gold;
    what I yield surpasses choice silver.
I walk in the way of righteousness,
    along the paths of justice,
bestowing a rich inheritance on those who love me
    and making their treasuries full. (Proverbs 8:17-21)

Johnson’s poem, like the Ecclesiastes passage, starts out with grim news but then follows it up with this heavenly reminder. We all need such reminding in these dark days.

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Thoughts on Teaching as School Begins

By Robin Bates | Published: July 31, 2025
Blanche Fisher Wright, illus. from The Real Mother Goose

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Friday

Hard as it may be to believe, today is the first day of school in many parts of Tennessee. As I recall from my childhood, school was always sweltering at the beginning (no air conditioning then), but the compensation was ending the year in the freshness of May.

Here’s a rather grim poem to kick off the school year, written from the vantage point of a teacher who is feeling his age. He sees his own mortality in the chill of “another autumn morning,” which he contrasts with “the april faces” that “gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves.”

Brooding on death, “who carries off all the prizes,” the speaker has difficulty separating out “the dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes.” The chalk dust that has gotten into his lungs after all these years ominously presages more serious illnesses. He thinks that he “shall never reacquaint myself with joy.”

May I suggest that this individual is taking the wrong approach to his profession? Rather than find ways to excite his students, which would energize him as well, he sounds like the aptly named M’Choakumchild in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. This Scottish teacher aims to make learning as boring as possible:

So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner.  He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.  He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.  He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek.  He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass.  Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild.  If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

Dickens compares M’Choakumchld to Morgiana in the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” who pours boiling water into each of the large vessels containing a thief. Dickens asks ominously, 

Say, good M’Choakumchild.  When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!

Scannell’s aging schoolmaster may be a little better in that he at least distinguishes between different students. But if you make teaching about yourself rather than your students, sooner or later your job will feel like one damn class after another.

Aging Schoolmaster
By Vernon Scannell

And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.

Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,

And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell

From which I gaze upon the april faces
That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves,
And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy
Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.

With careful effort I can separate the faces,
The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes,
But in the autumn shades I find I only
Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.

Speaking for myself, I can say that I was as excited about teaching at the end of my 36 years at St. Mary’s College of Maryland as I was at the beginning. That’s because I encouraged each student to find his or her way into a work, which meant that I myself was always gaining new insights into the works I taught. I have shared many of these insights on this blog and in my book.

Mortality did play some role in my decision to retire, with an infection picked up in a hospital leading to pericarditis and myocarditis. But I didn’t brood on death because I could see new horizons opening up for my students. Under my coaching, they took works they encountered in my courses and, through them, opened up new horizons for themselves.

In other words, enough with the self-pity. Teaching is a noble calling, a reward in and of itself, and should be regarded as such. If you can’t see that, then get out of the classroom.

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