Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Pope?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 27, 2026
Burton, O’Toole as Becket, Henry II

Tuesday

Donald Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo have prompted commentators to turn to two historical precedents that have generated fine literary works. Blogger Asha Rangappa of Freedom Academy, detecting Henry VIII and Thomas More dynamics at work, mentions Hillary Mantel’s Booker-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. Atlantic’s Peter Wehner, meanwhile, looks at what T.S. Eliot says about Henry II and Thomas Becket in his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral.

Rangappa focuses on how Henry VIII demanded that his subjects choose him over the Pope, which is not unlike how Trump forces his underlings to choose him over the Constitution:

Henry required his subjects to take these oaths after he divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, a move not condoned nor recognized by the Church. He got around this proscription by basically telling the Pope to take the L and making himself the head of the Church of England, and getting Parliament to pass two acts to ratify his break with the church and legitimize his marriage to Anne. These acts mandated the respective oaths: the Oath of Succession acknowledged Henry’s heirs with Anne Boleyn as legitimate, and the Oath of Supremacy recognized Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England.

When Thomas, who had been a close advisor, refused, Henry accused him of treason and tried and executed him. “Very Trumpy!” Rangappa observes.

Although Vice President J.D. Vance has a forthcoming book trumpeting his conversion to Catholicism—Communion is due out in June–he is proving himself no Thomas More. Or Becket either, to shift to an earlier conflict where a king’s command led to the death of an archbishop. One imagines Trump as Henry II saying some version of, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and of Vance immediately choosing to be one of the murderous knights rather than standing up for his spiritual leader. In Trump forcing Vance to choose himself over the Pope, Rangappa says that it’s hard to tell  

whether for Trump this is mainly a loyalty-test-as-humiliation-ritual, or loyalty-test-to-tank-JD’s-chances-to-be-president, or loyalty-test-because-this-will-be-the-ultimate-show-of-subservience…or some combination of all three. Whatever it is, J.D. has passed with flying colors, warning the Pope to “be careful” and to “stick to matters of morality.”

To be sure, Trump hasn’t only sent Vance to take down Leo but has been attempting to be an assassin knight himself. As Wehner in his Atlantic article observes,

No president has ever attacked the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church so directly and so personally. Trump called Leo “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” He attacked the pontiff for opposing his Iran-war policy, labeling him a “very liberal person” who is “catering to the radical left.” He also said Leo owed his papacy to Trump. It’s unusual, to say the least, for a head of state—in this case, of the most powerful nation in the world—to treat the bishop of Rome as a bitter political rival.

Wehner then turns to Eliot’s play. To set up the Becket/Leo vs. Henry/Trump parallels, Wehner says there is “a dramatic, even archetypal quality” to the contrast between the pope and the president. On the one hand, Leo is “a religious man in the deepest sense; the whole of his life has been shaped by religious disciplines and a theological tradition. He is inseparable from his faith.” Trump, on the other hand, “measures success by wealth, by power, by sexual conquest. He admitted that he’s never asked God for forgiveness. He has no ties to any church and is in many ways contemptuous of the core teachings of the Christian faith.”

Unlike many of Trump’s Christian evangelical supporters, who have sold out Jesus for power, Wehner says that Leo  

is unwilling to subordinate his faith to politics, or to adjust his commitment to the Gospel in exchange for access to power. A man who served the poor in Peru during the Shining Path insurgency—he stayed when others left—is not particularly fearful of critical posts on Truth Social or of those within his church who might disapprove of his public stand in defense of justice and a Christian ethic. He’s a person with deep moral convictions but who holds them with grace and ease. He comes across as calm, centered, and unhurried. He believes he answers to a higher authority; this allows him to offer a true Christian witness. This is a gift to the whole Church, and to the whole world.

At this point Wehner turns to Murder in the Cathedral, where Elliot writes, “Even now, in sordid particulars, the eternal design may appear.” 

What Eliot means here, Wehner writes,

is that in the midst of a broken, chaotic world, where despair often abounds, there is an eternal design at play, even if we may not quite see it while we’re living through it. Nor is the divine set apart from human suffering. Christians believe that God entered into the suffering and violence of this world, redeeming even the “sordid particulars.” 

Wehner adds, however, that this “doesn’t happen on its own.” We need religious leaders who believe, as Leo does, that the church should not be “the master or the servant of the state but the conscience of the state, its guide and critic and never its tool.” Wehner cites political philosopher Glenn Tinder, who in The Political Meaning of Christianity asserts, “Love obligates us to stay in the world where most of our fellow human beings are compelled by circumstances to stay.” A prophetic stance is necessary because it “can show us how to live in temporal society as citizens of an eternal society.”

Wehner concludes that such a prophetic stance has been conspicuously missing for the past decade. In fact, it’s rare at any time. We’re seeing it at present, however, thanks to “a native of the South Side of Chicago, who now resides in Vatican City.”

Added note: According to Wikipeida, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” is from the Burton-O’Toole film. In Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play, on which the film is based, Henry II says, “Will no one rid me of him? A priest! A priest who jeers at me and does me injury.” An 18th century author imagines Henry to have said, “O wretched Man that I am, who shall deliver me from this turbulent priest?” And he may have been inspired by a contemporaneous account, from a man present at Becket’s death, who quoted Henry as saying, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!” The film version has become the one most people quote.

In any event, they all apply only too well to Trump’s sentiments about Leo.

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Is the Wind-Up Bird a Woodpecker?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 26, 2026

Monday

As the Guardian wrote about one of my favorite contemporary novelists recently, the headline provides the prompt for today’s post, even though it made little sense to me: “Haruki Murakami to publish first novel to feature woman as lead character.” 

It made little sense since 1Q84, my favorite Murakami novel, has a female protagonist. 

To be strictly factual, Aoame, a massage therapist and secret assassin (she assassinates men who abuse women and little girls), is a co-protagonist since she shares the stage with math instructor and novelist Tengo, also a wonderful character. Still, I bonded so deeply with Aoame that I blinked twice when I read in the article that Murakami “has faced criticism for portrayal of women.” 

Aoame isn’t an exception. Many of Murakami’s female characters live in my imagination, even when they don’t command center stage. If I look at my three favorite Murakami novels, there’s a dowager who runs a house for battered women in 1Q84 and the psychic Creta Kano and the mixed-up teenager May Kasahara in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. To be sure, Kafka on the Shore doesn’t have any female characters that grab my mind, but there’s the wondrous transgender man Oshima, who calls traditional gendering into question. In fact, all these characters are more interesting than male protagonists Kafka and Wind-Up Bird’s Toru Okada. So no, I don’t think it’s a stretch for Murakami’s latest novel to have a female lead.

I’ve been thinking of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle recently because we have our own wind-up bird in southern Appalachia. The pileated woodpecker has a distinctive call (you can listen to it here) that seems a bit like the bird that Toru describes in the early pages:

There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird. Kumiko [Toru’s wife] gave it the name. We didn’t know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn’t bother the wind-up bird. Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighborhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world.

Later, when Kumiko has run away, Toru meets a teenage neighbor. When she challenges him to come up with a nickname for himself—she considers his name boring—“wind-up bird” pops into his head:

“Wind-up bird?” she asked, looking at me with her mouth open. “What is that?”

“The bird that winds the spring,” I said. “Every morning. In the treetops. It winds the world’s spring. Creeak.”

She went on staring at me.

I sighed. “It just popped into my head,” I said. “And there’s more. The bird comes over by my place every day and goes Creeak in the neighbor’s tree. But nobody ever sees it.”

From that moment on, May refers to Toru only as “Mr. Wind-up Bird.”

The pileated woodpecker is an immensely large and prehistoric looking bird that makes one understand how birds are related to dinosaurs or perhaps are dinosaurs. It too has a loud call, and while I don’t know whether Murakami’s bird is a woodpecker, there’s a woodpecker reference late in the novel. Its distinctive drumming again reminds me of our pileated:

Far off in the woods that surround the pond, a bird cried. I looked up and scanned the area, but there was nothing more to hear. Nothing to see. There was only the dry, hollow sound of a woodpecker drilling a hole in a tree trunk. 

Our pileated’s drumming echoes through the woods.

What’s the significance of the wind-up bird? Partly it’s that Toru has been living a mechanical existence, and May’s mocking use of the name helps jolt him out of his sedentary life. On his journey to find his wife, he discovers that she is in the grip of forces, embodied by her evil brother (Noboru Wataya), that are corrupting Japanese society. Holding to a daily routine won’t answer the moment.

In past posts about Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I’ve seen these forces at work in American society as well. Here’s what I wrote in one:

[Murakami] seeks to understand the resurgence of rightwing nationalism in 1990s Japan, the so-called lost decade. While the Japanese rightwing isn’t exactly like America’s—Wataya is an intellectual whereas Trump is just the opposite—Murakami grasps how demagogues tap into a reservoir of repressed rage and turn it to their advantage. Both serve as midwives to what Murakami describes at one point as a “gooey white thing like a lump of fat” that proceeds to possess the host.

That gooey substance at one point I compare to “the bile that flows from those Trump supporters shouting racist, anti-Semitic, or misogynist slurs at a rally or indulging in such sentiments from afar.” 

Toru at one point discovers this darkness, this penchant for violence, dwells within himself as well. What saves him is his love for Kumiko and his concern for May. He is willing to face up to the dark side of himself and imagine a future where he cares for others. Empathy and love, in other words, are the keys to defeating Wataya. As his wife writes to him,

At least I still had the power to dream, I knew. My brother couldn’t prevent me from doing that. I was able to sense that you were doing everything in your power to draw nearer to me. Maybe someday you would find me, and hold me, and sweep away the filth that was clinging to me, and take me away from that place forever. Maybe you would smash the curse and set the seal so that the real me would never have to leave again. That was how I was able to keep a tiny flame of hope alive in that cold, dark place with no exit—how I was able to preserve the slightest remnant of my own voice.

But back to the bird. There’s something unearthly in the pileated woodpecker’s cry—and perhaps in Murakami’s bird as well—as though they are attempting to alert us to the danger. If that’s case, then the wind-up bird isn’t only a metaphor for our complacency but also functions as an alarm clock. Its haunting cry is attempting to awaken something deep within us.

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Chaucer’s Life-Affirming Christianity

By Robin Bates | Published: April 25, 2026

From the Ellsmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales

Sunday

Because we have been in the grip of a weeks-long drought, the rain that fell yesterday had our hearts singing. When April showers perce the droghte of March to the roote, then longen folk like me to recite the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

I’ve written a lot about how another 14th century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, represented a healthy correction to death-cult Christianity, which is to say to Christianity that spurns life on earth and focuses entirely on the next world. That many in the 1300 have rejected nature is understandable given that nature attacked Christendom with full force in the years 1346 to 1353, with the Black Death killing up to half the population. Many concluded that God was punishing humankind for its sins, and one saw the rise of flagellants and other body-hating and sex-rejecting groups. People hoped that, by punishing themselves, they could ward off God’s wrath.

SGGK and Canterbury Tales were written a few decades later so memories of the plague were still fresh. Nevertheless, their response is to celebrate the regenerative powers of nature rather than reject it. When spring starts busting out all over, Chaucer tells us, “then longen fok to goon on pilgrimages.”

Some background here on British Christianity’s relationship with nature is useful here. The process of syncretism, in which a new religion incorporates elements of the old, meant that Christianity could not altogether displace the Anglo-Saxons’ cult of Ēostre, a fertility goddess brought over from northern Europe. As a result, for a while Easter was associated with a seasonal holiday, the spring equinox, when the days become longer than the nights. Christmas worked the same, being associated with the winter solstice, the darkest time of year. While this could work for the birth of Christ, however, it was less possible with the resurrection, which was connected with Passover and therefore had a long Jewish history. Eventually Ēostrian Christians had to surrender the equinox, although they did get to name the holiday and keep the symbolism of fertile rabbits and life-producing eggs.

In other words, British Christianity, whether influenced by its contact with the Anglo-Saxon or the Celtic fertility religions, always had a strong connection with nature, and poets could turn to this dimension in the years after the Black Death. The opening lines of Canterbury Tales are dripping with nature imagery as April showers inject flowers with life-generating power. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, drawing on his own Celtic tradition, captures this power when he writes, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age.”

For Chaucer, bodily lust and religious devotion are intermixed so that the same west wind that awakens the birds to their mating rituals also awakens the people of England spiritually. The Canterbury pilgrimage provides the framework for one of the world’s masterpieces, a literary vision so vibrant and so teeming with life in all its variety that it leaves me breathless.  My belief is that Chaucer, with such three-dimensional characters as the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Miller, and many others, made Shakespeare possible two centuries later.

I share both the original and a translation below. If you can, start by giving the Middle English version as you’ll discover a richness lacking in the translation. You can listen to Morgan Freeman reading it here.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Translation
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,                 
And bathed every vein [of the plants] in such liquid                 
By which power the flower is created;                 
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,                 
In every wood and field has breathed life into                  
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries,                 
And small fowls make melody,                 
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes                 
(So Nature incites them in their hearts),                 
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,                 
And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,                 
To distant shrines, known in various lands;                 
And specially from every shire’s end                 
Of England to Canterbury they travel,                 
To seek the holy blessed martyr,                 
Who helped them when they were sick.

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Making Lit Meaningful for Students

By Robin Bates | Published: April 24, 2026

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 31st installment

I mentioned in last week’s memoir installment that, upon receiving my college’s Teacher of the Year Award (for service), I wondered if I was worthy of it. Might it not just be a sympathy award for my having lost a child. In any event, I returned from my 2001-02 sabbatical determined to earn it. 

This resulted in a schedule that, in retrospect, looks crazed. I was Department chair for five years; edited a monthly school supplement called the River Gazette (for which I would eventually write 61 articles and edit the faculty contributions of countless others); ran a monthly book discussion group at the local library and a monthly film series at a local senior center; spearheaded a major curriculum revision effort that ended with the establishment of first-year seminars; and in the summer ran a film series in conjunction with the college’s summer concert series and continued to coordinate the summer faculty writing group. I also served on our church vestry and taught Education for Ministry classes. At home, meanwhile, Julia and I started taking in foreign students. And, oh yes, I was also teaching.

I mention all this, not to impress or to horrify you—horrified would probably be a more appropriate response—but to examine what possessed me. It is true that, with Darien and Toby now both enrolled at St. Mary’s, I had more time on my hands, and college service has a way of filling any vacuum. I think, however, that I was mostly seeking to shore up my community after having lost faith, with Justin’s death, in the stability of the world with Justin’s death. Our college’s mission gave my life meaning–to teach the liberal arts at a public college open to all incomes—and I felt that the success of that mission depended upon faculty and staff stepping up.

I can’t say that literature here played a role other than my having spent much of my life in Victorian and Edwardian fiction, where commitment to community is paramount (Kipling’s wolf pack and E. Nesbit’s Bastable children come immediately to mind). I therefore turn this “Life Lived in Literature” memoir to my teaching, which (as I have mentioned) had taken on a new richness. Attuned as I had become to the challenges my students were facing—many had sorrows of their own–I realized that linking their lives to the profundity of literary masterpieces would enhance their appreciation, deepen them as human beings, and provide them with strategies for moving forward.

In my book Better Living through Literature I talk about how I developed what I call a “sandwich structure” for their essays. If the students wished to, in their introduction they could relate a personal story that was triggered by a work. The second part of the essay—the meat filling, as it were—had to be confined to talking about how the work handled the theme the student had identified (no personal reminiscences allowed here). In the conclusion they were to examine the insights the work has opened up into their experiences and that their experiences had opened up in the work. I didn’t want the personal story to overwhelm literary interpretation so each had its place in the essay.

What emerged were the most powerful essays I have ever received. Students were using Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to explore sexual abuse, Mary Oliver poems to explore depression, Twelfth Night to explore gender exploration, Uncle Tom’s Cabin to explore experiences with racism, Beowulf to explore grief. A student suffering from a non-stop migraine found comfort in Julian of Norwich while a student raised in a fundamentalist Alabama family used Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to recalibrate the relationship between faith and secular learning. (She came to a more balanced understanding than that achieved by either her family or Faustus.)

I mention in my book the senior lacrosse player who identified with the wedding guest in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In his case, he equated the gratuitous killing of the albatross with gratuitous acts of campus vandalism committed by drunken lacrosse players, and he emerged from his essay determined to live his life differently. (After hearing the mariner’s story, the wedding guest becomes “a sadder and a wiser man.”) 

Another inspiring story was how Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park impacted a student who had been born prematurely with serious birth defects, including a frozen larynx. Originally pointed towards special ed programs, she was saved by an activist mother, who got her mainstreamed. Against all expectations (except her mother’s) she flourished in school and graduated from St. Mary’s as its valedictorian. If the student loved Austen’s novel, she realized, it’s because the meek Fanny Price, against considerable odds, steps into her own powers by the end. Importantly, Fanny realizes she can’t rely fully on her beloved mentor (Edmund Bertram) but must find her own way, just as my student was realizing that she would have to, upon graduating, leave behind her mother and the school system that had validated her. (I tell the story here, here, here, and here.)

Another great story, which I’ve told multiple times including in my book, happened years later. While it didn’t involve an essay, it shows what literature can unleash in students given the right conditions. Matt was an ex-marine who found himself rethinking his war experiences after reading the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I quote here from my book:

Matt had become an enthusiastic English major after having served two deployments in Afghanistan, where he defused roadside bombs. In a classroom discussion about death, he remarked that he had learned to not care about dying when he was in the service. 

While acknowledging that I was in no position to contradict him, I mentioned Gawain thinking he can shrug off his death fears, only to discover by the end of the poem that he can’t. “In destinies sad or merry, / True men can but try,” Gawain initially says, thinking himself calm as he prepares to keep a rendezvous with certain death. By the end of the poem, however, the Green Knight reveals he has set up his challenges to teach Gawain a lesson: he wants the Camelot knight to acknowledge that he cares for his life after all.

As we weren’t reading the poem for the class, Matt went to the campus bookstore, bought a copy, blew off the Jane Eyre reading assignment, and spent half the night reading the fourteenth-century romance. The next day he told me how true the poem was. Even as he and his comrades had joked about death, he said, they were also careful to don their Kevlar vests whenever they went out on a mission. This he compared to Gawain secretly and somewhat dishonorably accepting a life-saving green girdle from the lady of a castle, where he is temporarily residing before journeying to meet the Green Knight. Gawain is ashamed that he wears it, especially after the Green Knight reveals that he knows of its existence. The poem helped Matt re-process his war experience in ways none of us could have predicted.

As every good teacher knows, we learn as much from our students as they learn from us. I suddenly realized, from Matt’s experience, that 14th century England would have been recovering from its own trauma, having endured the Black Plague only two or three decades previously. That someone with first or second-hand experience of Europe’s greatest natural disaster could compose a comic work with vivid images of life is a marvel. At a time when society was understandably succumbing to a life-denying version of Christianity (spurn this world, focus on the afterlife), the poet helped his audience recover a life-affirming connection with nature. After encountering Matt’s response, I understood better the role the poem had played in my own grieving. (I tell that story here.)

I could go on and on. After 2009, I started sharing many of these “reading stories” on my blog (always with the student’s permission, of course), which served the students as well as the broader public. I can honestly say that, most semesters, I received a meaningful final essay—an essay where something was at stake—from every student I taught. 

To elicit such work, however, took a tremendous amount of work from both teacher and student. It all began with the weekly thousand-word “free writes” I required for each work. These I would read over quickly, looking for instances where I could see that their interest was particularly piqued. (I compared it to looking for blips on a radar screen.) They would later use these moments of connection to determine the topic of their final essay, for which I would require a proposal, a rough draft, a polished essay (graded), and (if they chose) a revision.

Often the most significant professor-student encounters I have ever had were the required post-essay meeting. As I graded stringently but had a generous revision policy (the revised grade would replace the original), they had extra motivation to revise, and in any event revision became easier given how committed they had become to their topic. For the first time in my life, my teaching and their learning felt absolutely authentic.

During these years (2002-08) I was also involved in a Pew grant about ways to increase environmental awareness in our classes. More on that next week. 

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026) 
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026) 
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
After the 2nd Death, a Book Project (April 17, 2026)
Making Lit Meaningful for Students (April 24, 2026)

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Bezos and the Diamond as Big as the Ritz

By Robin Bates | Published: April 22, 2026

Thursday

There’s an apocryphal exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway about the super wealthy. Fitzgerald supposedly observed, “The rich are different from you and me,” to which Hemingway curtly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” While Hemingway gets in the zinger, however, I want to weigh in on Fitzgerald’s side after reading a disturbing Atlantic article about Amazon head Jeff Bezos. In stories like The Great Gatsby and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Fitzgerald shows that he understood in a profound way how money rewires the existential reality of the rich. Hemingway’s retort fails to acknowledge this.

First, a note on the story. A website devoted to setting the record straight tells what actually took place between the two authors. Hemingway took the line from Fitzgerald’s story “The Rich Boy” and quoted it out of context in an early version of his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Here’s what Hemingway wrote:

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

Hemingway had to change the name from “Scott Fitzgerald” to “Julian” in the revised story because Fitzgerald was legitimately outraged. Here’s the context for the quote from “Rich Boy,” in which very little romantic awe is expressed:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

Fitzgerald knew what Noah Hawley discovered when he wrote “What I Learned about Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat.” The creator of the FX series Fargo and Alien: Earth, Hawley learned that (to quote the article’s subtitle) “For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.”

The article is chilling and explains a lot about the behavior of our own billionaires, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Although I first thought of Tom and Daisy when I read the piece—I wrote about The Great Gatsby last week in relation to our billionaires—“A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” captures even better the essence of what Hawley discovered. I’ll look first at his article and then Fitzgerald’s story.

Hawley notes that figures like Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have left the world of consequences behind. Because they “float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves,” everything becomes effectively free, nothing can ever be lost, failure fails to mean anything, and they come to feel invulnerable.

This feeling of vulnerability, Hawley goes on to say, has “deep psychological ramifications”:

If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.”

Hawley points out how most of us develop moral reasoning. The very fact that our actions have consequences means that we are continually having to accommodate ourselves to reality as it actually is. “When you can buy your way out of any mistake,” Hawley explains, “when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.”

Thus you have such jaw-dropping statements and erratic as the following:

When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.

This psychological phenomenon also explains the assault on empathy we have been witnessing, especially from Musk:

Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.

“Diamond as Big as the Ritz” dramatizes Hawley’s observations to perfection. John Unger, from a respectable family in the Midwest, attends a fancy prep school out east (St. Midas, fittingly enough) and makes friends with one Percy Washington. Percy invites John out to his place in the Montana Rockies and, on the train ride out there, confides to him that his father “is by far the richest man in the world,” although no one knows this. His wealth lies in the mountain upon which he lives, which is one large diamond.

All this must be kept secret, however, because, if it were known, diamond prices worldwide would collapse, along with the economies based on them. The sense of entitlement that this immense wealth brings with it, along with the measures needed to maintain secrecy, result in the characters exhibiting the same psychological behavior described in the Atlantic article.

First of all, there are the ways that the Washingtons have manipulated things to hide the mountain from government surveyors. Think of this as a version of the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill, which billionaires got Congress to pass, even though health and safety net programs had to be slashed to provide them with their tax breaks. Think also of the way tax laws have been set up to insure that billionaires will pay almost nothing. In “Big as the Ritz,” Percy reveals how billionaire intervention has three times stymied the government from surveying the diamond mountain: 

The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State survey; the second time he had the official maps of the United States  tinkered with–that held them for fifteen years. The last time was harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up. He had a whole set of surveying instruments made with a slight defection that would allow for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them for the ones that were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he had what looked like a village built up on its banks–so that they’d see it, and think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley.

Hawley’s observation that the wealthy don’t encounter any checks is captured in the Washingtons’ golf course. John learns that it is all greens and contains “no fairway, no rough, no hazards.”

The one thing the Washingtons cannot escape, however, is airplanes, and we start getting a glimpse of how wealth has warped them in the casual way that Percy remarks on the aviators they have in captivity. Elon Musk would be proud in how he’s shut down his empathy:

We’ve got half a dozen anti-aircraft guns and we’ve arranged it so far–but there’ve been a few deaths and a great many prisoners. Not that we mind that, you know, father and I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there’s always the chance that some time we won’t be able to arrange it.

The corruption is on full display in an interchange between Percy’s father and one of the captive pilots:

“Let me ask you a few questions!” he cried. “You pretend to be a fair-minded man.”

“How absurd. How could a man of my position be fair-minded toward you? You might as well speak of a Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak.”

At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen fell, but the tall man continued:

“All right!” he cried. “We’ve argued this out before. You’re not a humanitarian and you’re not fair-minded, but you’re human–at least you say you are–and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place for long enough to think how–how–how–”

“How what?” demanded Washington, coldly.

“–how unnecessary–”

“Not to me.”

“Well–how cruel–”

“We’ve covered that. Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is involved. You’ve been soldiers; you know that. Try another.”

While all this is going on, John and the younger Washington daughter are falling in love and are even fantasizing about marriage. At this point, if not earlier, it begins to dawn on the reader that John himself is not all that safe. In fact, we learn (this when Kismine inadvertently blurts out the truth) that he will be bumped off before the visit ends. John learns that this has happened many times before. I quote at length from their conversation because it captures just how wealth distorts the wealthy. Other people are nothing more playthings, to be used for all the pleasure that can be got out of them and then discarded:

“Do you mean to say that your father had them murdered before they left?”

She nodded.

“In August usually–or early in September. It’s only natural for us to get all the pleasure out of them that we can first.”

“How abominable! How–why, I must be going crazy! Did you really admit that–”

“I did,” interrupted Kismine, shrugging her shoulders. “We can’t very well imprison them like those aviators, where they’d be a continual reproach to us every day. And it’s always been made easier for Jasmine and me, because father had it done sooner than we expected. In that way we avoided any farewell scene–”

“So you murdered them! Uh!” cried John.

“It was done very nicely. They were drugged while they were asleep–and their families were always told that they died of scarlet fever in Butte.”

“But–I fail to understand why you kept on inviting them!”

“I didn’t,” burst out Kismine. “I never invited one. Jasmine did. And they always had a very good time. She’d give them the nicest presents toward the last. I shall probably have visitors too–I’ll harden up to it. We can’t let such an inevitable thing as death stand in the way of enjoying life while we have it. Think of how lonesome it’d be out here if we never had anyone. Why, father and mother have sacrificed some of their best friends just as we have.”

Along with sacrificing invited guests, the elder Washington even thinks he can buy off God. In one surreal scene we see him proffering a huge diamond of incalculable value to the Almighty if only He will swallow up the aviators.

While I assume that our billionaires aren’t directly killing people, they are more than willing to sacrifice the rest of us, along with American democracy, in their quest for ever more wealth. They’re sitting on a diamond as big as the Ritz and it’s still not enough.

And, oh yes, if anyone threatens their wealth, they’ll take everyone down with them. Historian Timothy Snyder wonders if we are currently witnessing “superpower suicide” and, in the story, the Washingtons blow up their mountain, themselves, and the invading aviators who have discovered them. Either they control things or nobody does.

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Earth Day: Mary Oliver Notices

By Robin Bates | Published: April 21, 2026
South Dakota buffalo herd

Wednesday – Earth Day

To observe Earth Day 2026 I’m repurposing an old essay, written 14 years ago. Mary Oliver’s “Ghosts” seems appropriate given how the occasion calls for us to both acknowledge horrific damage to the environment and hold onto hope that we can turn things around. Oliver looks both back and forward—back to horrific instances of devastation and forward to the truth, written in “the book of the earth, that “nothing can die.”

 Oliver references whites slaughtering the buffalo herds, sometimes for meat, sometimes to eradicate the Native American food supply. The slaughter also receives treatment by Ojibwe/Chippewa author Louise Erdrich. In the Mighty Red she describes the size of the herds, which may have numbered 30 million animals at their height:

After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle–the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. “You may judge now the richness of these prairies,” he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

We see mention of the elimination in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. In a particularly haunting scene that twists the heart, a few remaining buffalo, crazed by the slaughter of their comrades, commit suicide:

“The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”

In “Ghosts” Oliver shows train passengers engaging in the slaughter: 

Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.

Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood – hellhunks
in the prairie heat.

Over a century later the poet observes that there are still traces of the once great herds:

Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth…

Rather than only despair over the devastation that whites have visited upon the buffalo, however, she talks about what one must do to “coax them out again.” The answer lies in “the people dancing.”

For the Lakota Sioux, every being shares the same spiritual essence, called Wakan Tanka, which is ritually honored through dancing and other ways. Oliver’s own dance is her poem, and her role as a metaphorical dancer is to “notice” (a word that appears repeatedly throughout the poem) and tell us what she sees. Put another way, the poet is a seer who uses words to convey her vision. The tongue, Oliver says, is “the sweetest meat.”

One thing she notices is the ecosystem that grew up around the buffalo herds. Reading the journal of Meriwether Lewis (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition), she notes how a sparrow’s nest is woven from buffalo hair.

While Oliver is identifying with Lewis as observer here, she also identifies with the day-old chicks. Even though they have “left the perfect world” and fallen into “the perils of this one,” they are also lying in “flowered fields.” In other words, our world is filled with both immense beauty and terrible danger, and it is our responsibility to record what has passed and to “notice” what can still be seen. We are called upon to be as vulnerable and open as these young chicks.

The poem ends on a visionary note very much in the spirit of Earth Day: Oliver dreams about a newly born red buffalo calf being tongued by its mother “in the fragrant grass/ in the wild domains,” and she wants to enter this communion. In the vision of perfect peace and tranquility that is the dream and the poem, that which has “gone away into the earth to hide” momentarily flares forth. Through our imaginations, it is born again. Oliver is reading from the Lakota “book of the earth” in assuring that “nothing can die,” despite all the damage done by the shooting train passengers of our world. She can see the ghosts of the past and helps us to see them as well.

Ghosts
By Mary Oliver

1
Have you noticed?

2
Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts
lay down on the earth and died
it’s hard to tell now
what’s bone, and what merely
was once.

The golden eagle, for instance,
has a bit of heaviness in him;
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward deeper grass.

3
1805
near the Bitterroot Mountains:
a man named Lewis kneels down
on the prairie watching

a sparrow’s nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop
and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,
not more than a day hatched, lean
quietly into the thick wool as if
content, after all,
to have left the perfect world and fallen,

helpless and blind
into the flowered fields and the perils
of this one.

4
In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:
they have gone away into the earth to hide.
Nothing will coax them out again
but the people dancing.

5
Said the old-timers:
the tongue
is the sweetest meat.

Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.

Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood – hellhunks
in the prairie heat.

6
Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.

7
Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
and with the tenderness of any caring woman,
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dream I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.

We can use this day to rekindle our own connection and ask for admittance.

Further thought: I wonder if the passage

Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. 

alludes to the Sara Teasdale’s unsettling “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which imagines the world recovering after nuclear warfare has wiped out humanity:

Then Will Come Soft Rains
By Sara Teasdale

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

I suppose there’s some consolation in knowing that nature will continue on, regardless of what we do to ourselves. Still, homo sapiens are such remarkable creatures that it would be tragic if they disappeared from the scene. Better to learn how to live together.

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Listen Carefully, the Books Are Whispering

By Robin Bates | Published: April 20, 2026
Hilda Plowright as the librarian in The Philadelphia Story

Tuesday

As this is National Library Week, here’s a Charles Simic poem about the magic of libraries. I love the sense of mystery that he experiences as he discovers a book that no one has opened in 50 years.

While the book Simic discovers is about angels, it’s also about much more. Libraries open up the imagination, throwing us back into a world where angels and gods were once an integral part of people’s lives. I think of Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” where the poet—disgusted at how we “lay waste our powers” by buying and selling–longs to “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”

There may be another allusion at work in Simic’s poem. In the tale told by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, she imagines a time when the land was “fulfild of fayerye”—filled with fairy folk—and ruled over by an elf-queen. Just as, in modern times, the light of reason has banished angels and gods to the shadows—sun shines through Simic’s library window and the supernatural deities are “huddled”—so (according to the Wife) the “blessings” of friars have chased away the fairies. In her account, the light of Christianity has banished earth spirits, with Christian men of God clogging up “every land and every stream,/ As thick as specks of dust in the sunbeam.” The result is a world stripped of mystery.

In libraries, however, we can still catch glimpses of angels and gods, fairies and elves. While Simic’s librarian may carry the prosaic name of Miss Jones, she hears the books whispering. She is a priestess, presiding over this sacred space where earth and spirit worlds meet. If you are quiet, you will hear the whispering as well. 

In the Library 
By Charles Simic

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

Past posts about libraries
—The Courage of a Tennessee Librarian (March 25, 2026)
–“Useful Knowledge” vs. Literature  (March 9, 2026)
—Sharon Draper: My Granddaughter and a Banned Book  (Oct. 19, 025)
—Stephen King Understands MAGA (Oct. 5, 2025)
—Libraries, Bulwarks against Fascism  (April 8, 2025)
—Why Are Books Banned? They Change Lives (Sept. 22, 2024)
—Elena Ferrante: Idaho Libraries and My Brilliant Friend  (Sept. 19, 2024)
—Paul Hamilton Engle: The Dangerous Power of Libraries  (Aug. 20, 2024)
—On Defending Books against Bullies  (Oct. 1, 2023)
—The Social Novel Tackles Our Dilemmas (Sept. 19, 2023)
—Judy Blume: Fighting Back against Book Censors (April 11, 2023)
—Books Are Banned Because They Are Powerful (Jan. 19, 2023)
—Read to Resist Fascism (Oct. 26, 2022)
—Books Bans Leave Children Defenseless (April 25, 2022)
—The Fascist Right Goes for Sendak (April 17, 2022)
—LGBTQ+ Books under Fire  (Feb. 3, 2022)
—Time to Reread Fahrenheit 451 (Jan. 27, 2022)
—Banned Books Again on the Rise (Jan. 18, 2022)
—Yes, Virginia, Books ARE Dangerous   (Nov. 28, 2021)
—Rightwing Book Bans on the Rise  (Nov. 11, 2021)
—A Texas Pol Attacks Cider House Rules (Oct. 31, 2021)
—Literature, the Best Medicine (Oct. 20, 2021)
–Joe Mills: If Librarians Were Honest… https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/if-librarians-were-honest/ Feb. 19, 2020)
—Nikki Giovanni, A Book Held to the Chest, Close to the Heart (Feb. 11, 2020) 
—Libraries, Critical to Democracy (April 22, 2019)
—What Our Libraries Reveal about Us (June 13, 2018)
—Norman Finkelstein: A Poem in Praise of Libraries (Sept. 19, 2016)
—Scott Bates: The Liberating Power of a Yo-Yo in a Library  (Nov. 21, 2012)
—Alberto Manguel, Fight the Power, Check Out a Book  (June 30, 2011)
—Alberto Manguel, Our Inner Library: A Quiz (Jan. 5, 2011)
—Jorge Luis Borges, A Bookstore and the Library of Babel  (March 17, 2024)
—Scott Bates, Books Unleashed in Christmas Carrels (Dec. 25, 2009)

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Mercutio’s False Equivalence

By Robin Bates | Published: April 19, 2026
John McEnery as a dying Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1968)

Monday

Like many concerned about the state of the nation, I have been discouraged at how the mainstream media (MSM) fails to hold Donald Trump and rightwing authoritarianism to account. Rather than exposing the genuine threat that these figures represent, many news outlets simply present the two sides as equivalent. The New York Times has become so notorious at whitewashing Trump that there’s a parody social media account—New York Times Pitchbot—which hilariously imagines how the newspaper would soft pedal the president’s most egregious acts. Not that one has to invent examples since some of the actual headlines make the point by themselves.

For instance, during the 2024 presidential campaign media columnist Margaret Sullivan complained about the headline, “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.” Harris’s idea involved tax cuts designed to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers. Trump’s was massive deportations. One idea, in other words, was serious and worth examining, the other fascistic. You wouldn’t know that from the headline, however.

When voters are presented with such apparent symmetry, an understandable response is to voice Mercutio’s dying accusation in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague on both your houses.”

In a moment I’ll explain why Mercutio is in no position to make such an accusation, but let’s first examine what’s going on. By choosing not to judge, the MSM doesn’t acknowledge how the extreme right is exploiting false equivalence (also called “both-siderism” and “the cult of both sides”). As an article in Rational League puts it, false equivalence “rewards the side willing to break rules and punishes the one still trying to follow them.” Sometimes MSM goes even further, as MSNOW’s Nicole Wallace noted the other day in an interview with law professor Sherrilyn Ifill: the MSM will clean up Trump’s garbled statements so that they appear more coherent than they actually are. 

The Rational League article notes that, in pursuit of balance, the MSM “promises symmetry where none exists” and as a result, “allows tyranny to dress itself in the garb of democracy and go unchallenged.” Both the MSM and audiences get something from this: the MSM is able to float serenely above the fray while audiences retreat into “the safety blanket of false equivalence.”

“If both sides are bad,” Rational League points out, “then no side needs to be chosen. No side needs to be condemned. No side needs to be fought.” There’s no need to do anything about MAGA abusing immigrants, censoring books, criminalizing healthcare, or rewriting history.

Mercutio is guilty of false equivalence when he says “a plague on both your houses” although, in his defense, he is dying when he says it. Furthermore, there does not appear to be a great deal of difference between the Montagues and the Capulets (although Tybalt appears worse than any Montague). But Mercutio himself has thrown in his lot with the Montagues and has been helping inflame the rivalry. After all, if Mercutio did not insist on Romeo fighting Tybalt and then take on the duel himself, thereby prompting Romeo’s ill-fated intervention, things would have taken a less violent turn.

In a way, I suppose this makes Mercutio a good symbol of those bad faith actors in our own political wars: while he claims to be above the partisanship, he is actually profiting from it. He is certainly not the cool head that is needed to defuse the situation. Indeed, Romeo and Juliet might have found a way to realize Friar Laurence’s dream of reconciling the two families if this unstable “friend” hadn’t stirred the pot. Think of Mercutio as a media personality who feeds off of conflict and whose ratings would drop if there were a peaceful resolution.

By ignoring the threat to journalism itself, the MSM is not unlike Verona’s prince, who in the end castigates himself as well as the warring families. If he had taken the situation more seriously, he says, he wouldn’t now be surveying smoking ruins. Or to use his words,

Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish’d.

The MSM has been winking at our discord rather than taking a stand for democracy. At this rate, all will be punish’d.

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Ravenous Wolves in the White House

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2026
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

Sunday

While I had planned an Earth Day-related post for today, it will have to wait until next week because of how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is using Jesus to justify our attack on Iran. I know what John Milton would say.

Let’s first survey how Hegseth is invoking Christianity. Back on March 15, several members of the military (11 Christians, one Muslim, one Jew) complained that Hegseth regards the attack as a holy war with End Times ramifications. As one non-commissioned officer reported in an email, Hegseth

urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

More recently, Hegseth compared journalists exposing the war’s failures to the Pharisees who complained about Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath: 

“The Pharisees — the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time — they were there to witness, to write everything down, to report,” the Defense chief continued. “But … even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.”

I guess this means that Trump and Hegseth are like the unappreciated Jesus.

Finally there was Hegseth citing the Book of Pulp Fiction in a prayer delivered at the Pentagon. The occasion was the rescue of the downed aviator, with “Sandy” being the call sign that aircraft use in rescue missions:

The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth prayed. “Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen.”

In Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino has Samuel Jackson cite Ezekiel 25:17 prior to murdering a man. “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them,” he thunders. 

This post wouldn’t be complete without the comparisons that televangelist Paula White-Cain has been making between Trump and Jesus, including this one on April 1:

“Jesus taught so many lessons through His death, burial and resurrection. He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life,” she said.

“You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for Him, and it didn’t end there for you,” she continued.

“God always had a plan. On the third day, He rose, He defeated evil, He conquered death, Hell and the grave. And because He rose, we all know that we can rise. And, sir, because of His resurrection, you rose up. Because He was victorious, you were victorious.”

Perhaps it was such language that prompted Trump to tweet out an image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. If his longtime spiritual advisor and member of his Faith Office sees the resemblance, why doesn’t everyone?

In response to people who abuse the word of God in these ways, Milton cites Matthew 7:15-16, where Jesus predicts that there will be “false prophets” who try to deceive people in his name:

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?

In one of Paradise Lost’s angriest passages, Milton also refers to these false prophets as wolves. The archangel Michael, foretelling the future so that Adam will understand the arc of history, tells him what will happen once Jesus’s apostles are no longer around to spread the message. He specifically has in mind authorities in the church establishment but the words apply equally well to anyone who appropriates “the Spirit of God” in joining “the sacred mysteries of Heaven” with “secular power”: 

Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves,
Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven
To their own vile advantages shall turn
Of lucre and ambition…
Then shall they seek to avail themselves of names,
Places, and titles, and with these to join
Secular power; though feigning still to act
By spiritual, to themselves appropriating
The Spirit of God…

These wolves will ultimately be judged, Milton predicts, and then he too draws on the Ezekiel sentiment:

Truth shall retire
Bestuck with slanderous darts, and works of faith
Rarely be found: So shall the world go on,
To good malignant, to bad men benign;
Under her own weight groaning; till the day
Appear of respiration to the just,
And vengeance to the wicked…

In other words, Hegseth will not be the instrument of God’s vengeance, as he so deliciously fantasizes, but the target. 

All this talk of vengeance, however, misses Jesus’s point entirely. As Jesus understood and as Milton demonstrates in his depiction of Satan, we make our own hells. “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly/ Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?/ Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,” laments the rebel angel.” Elsewhere, realizing that the adrenaline rush that accompanies destruction hollows out the soul, Satan acknowledges, “For only in destroying I find ease/ To my relentless thoughts.”

Hegseth is thoroughly enmeshed in his own mental turmoil although he appears to lack Satan’s self-awareness. Like those who crucified Jesus, he knows not what he does.

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