Caliban Defeats Prospero

By Robin Bates | Published: November 6, 2024
Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Caliban, Stefano and Trinculo

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Wednesday

Note: If today’s essay is a bit uneven, it’s because–writing it from Slovenia–I started it fairly confident that Kamala Harris would win the election, only to begin realizing we were witnessing 2016 redux as the night wore on. What is meant as a comic if somewhat disturbing subplot in Shakespeare’s final play–inept insurrectionists trying to overthrow Prospero, destroy his magic book, and seize Miranda–suddenly became the central action. It was as if The Tempest had transmuted into Richard III. (Think of Prospero’s book as the Constitution, Miranda as reproductive freedom.) In the course of the night, my headline changed from “Caliban vs. Prospero” to “Can Caliban Defeat Prospero?” to (sadly) “Caliban Defeats Prospero.” Following Trump’s victory, white nationalist Nick Fuentes gloated, in a tweet that received 22,000 likes, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Or as Caliban fantasizes after Prospero reminds him that he “didst seek to violate the honour of my child,”

O ho, O ho! would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

Anyway, here’s the essay that finally emerged from that dreadful night.

I taught The Tempest yesterday in my Ljubljana Shakespeare class and, as I await election results—it’s midnight on the east coast, early morning Central European Time—I’ve been having a fantasy based on the play. It involves many of Trump’s fanatical followers coming to see him as he really is.

Of course, this fantasy can only happen if he loses. If he wins, he will only build on the mythological status that he has assumed in their eyes.

I draw on one of the play’s subplots for the fantasy. Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax and a thoroughly disagreeable character, encounters two of the lesser survivors of the shipwreck, the drunken butler Stephano and court jester Trinculo. Thinking they are his key to overthrowing the magician Prospero and freeing him from servitude, Caliban links his fate with theirs.

Winning him over is the wine that Stephano is carrying, which I associate with Trump’s seductive rhetoric, whether it be his birther lie about Obama, his misogynist attacks on women,  his xenophobic descriptions of Mexicans, his Muslim ban, or all his other countless invitations to become our worst selves. Caliban, like Trump’s ardent fans, is enthralled:

These be fine things, an if they be not sprites. That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor.
I will kneel to him.

“Hast thou not dropp’d from heaven?” Caliban goes on to ask breathlessly and then goes even further in his adulation. Thrice we see him kneel down to kiss Stefano’s foot:

I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island;
And I will kiss thy foot: I prithee, be my god.

Why obey the old norms and conventions when one can follow a leader such as this? “A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!” Caliban declares as switches masters:

No more dams I’ll make for fish
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring;
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish
‘Ban, ‘Ban, Cacaliban
Has a new master: get a new man.
Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! freedom,
hey-day, freedom!

Caliban even has version of the Right’s “America for Americans” declaration: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me“–ignoring the fact that his mother, the witch Sycorax, established her family by conquest, imprisoning original inhabitant Ariel in a tree.

To be sure, to Trinculo’s outsider perspective Caliban appears a howling, drunken monster. But that’s often the way with cults: they seem perfectly logical and sane to those caught up in them.

As every student of fascism understands, from blind adoration to violence is only a short step. Caliban’s plan is to overthrow Prospero and seize his daughter:

Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him,
I’ th’ afternoon to sleep: there thou mayst brain him,
Having first seized his books, or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife. Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command: they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
He has brave utensils,–for so he calls them–
Which when he has a house, he’ll deck withal
And that most deeply to consider is
The beauty of his daughter; he himself
Calls her a nonpareil…

Stefano is as enthralled with the battle plan as were the January 6 insurrectionists with the idea of storming the Capitol. When he and Trinculo get to Prospero’s cave, however, they behave somewhat like those same intruders who wandered around the building taking selfies, trashing Nancy Pelosi’s office, and looting souvenirs. In this case, they put on Prospero’s garments, infuriating Caliban, who understands Prospero’s power:

The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean
To dote thus on such luggage? Let’s alone
And do the murder first: if he awake,
From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches,
Make us strange stuff.

Prospero, with the aid of the spirit Aeriel, then sends in his version of the National Guard— “Stage direction: Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds”—hunting the three as relentlessly as the FBI and Justice Department have hunted those who attacked the Capitol:

Prospero: Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark!
Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o’ mountain.

Aeriel: Hark, they roar!

In the end they are routed and tormented, after which comes the moment that I’m hoping for with Trump cultists. Prospero having ordered Caliban to his cell—”As you look to have my pardon, trim it handsomely”—the monsters see butler Stephano for who he really is. This is the moment I’m dreaming of with regard to Trump supporters:

 Caliban: I’ll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!

A major theme of The Tempest is rising above our earthly selves to a spiritual vision. As a white magic magus, Prospero seeks to bring order and enlightenment to a world that is riven by dark impulses, including political insurrection and unlawful passion.

But Caliban too is an integral part of who we are. America, a nation founded both on Enlightenment optimism and bloody conquest/enslaved labor, has a history of swinging back and forth between progressive ideals and brute impulse. “This thing of darkness, [I] acknowledge him mine,” Prospero says at the end of the play.

Will our version of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy end in tragedy or comedy? We stand here, as if on as knife edge, as

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives.

The passage is from Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written at another time when the world faced a fascist threat.

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America: Indivisible Despite the Divides

By Robin Bates | Published: November 4, 2024
Alicia Ostriker

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Tuesday

Last evening and again this evening, Julia and I have been attempting to explain the American election to students at the University of Ljubljana.. We start our presentation off with a conversation that I had with Slovenian colleague Janez Stanovnek almost 40 years ago. Janez was a Melville scholar who had spent his career teaching American literature, but that day he sounded befuddled. “I don’t understand how America works,” he said, shaking his head.

I’ve thought about that comment many times in the years since, and I understand his confusion. My immediate answer to him is that we are all united by the American Dream, and I still think that, only I now see it as a more complicated matter than I did then. But I’m also more impressed with the series of civic rituals we use to keep the dream alive, including children reciting “The Pledge of Allegiance,” sports fans singing the “Star Spangled Banner,” people flying the American flag from their houses, and teachers having us read such foundational texts as “The Declaration of Independence,” “The Gettysburg Address,” Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

These rituals don’t always ensure success, however, as our intense levels of current polarization make clear. And how could they? After all, what single dream would speak equally to immigrants from all over the world, as well as to Native Americans and to the descendants of those forced to come here (African slaves, convicts). And even if Americans could agree on a dream, think of the many ways that the dream fails us and that we fail the dream. Think of the blood that has been spilled in building this nation, the seemingly irresolvable conflicts. How could there possibly be, to quote from the “Pledge of Allegiance,” “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

And yet, miraculously, the dream still survives. I think of Hippolyta’s response to the confused stories that she and Theseus hear from the lovers in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although Theseus is prepared to dismiss them all as “antique fables” and fairy stories, Hippolyta detects some connecting theme:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

The American Dream is like that: some great constancy comes through, in spite of all the conflicts and contradictions.

Alicia Ostriker takes on these conflicts and contradictions in “Ghazal: America the Beautiful.” A ghazal is a Middle Eastern verse form composed of a least five couplets that often invokes a deep love and longing. Ghazals also feature repeated rhyme or word ending each stanza, and Ostriker’s repeated word–the subject of her longing–is “America.”

Ghazal: America the Beautiful
Alicia Ostriker

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America

The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America

We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America

I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America

School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America

What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America

Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America

Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America

We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America

Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America

There’s much I relate to in this poem, including the fragment from the song “School Days,” which we sang in first grade. It sounds like Ostriker, like me, would have preferred “America the Beautiful” as our national anthem over the more militant “Star Spangled Banner.” But whatever quarrels she has with “triumphant bully” America, she still finds herself putting her hand tenderly over her heart and pledging allegiance.

Langston Hughes, who as a Black man had every reason to hate America, nevertheless has a poem that concludes, “I too am America.” Despite our differences, somewhere deep is a dream that unites us all.

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Kamala Harris as Shakespeare’s Henry V

By Robin Bates | Published: November 4, 2024
Laurence Olivier as Henry V in the 1944 film

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Monday

Last week I compared Donald Trump to Shakespeare’s Richard II while examining the play for insights into peaceful vs. violent transfers of power. Today I look at similarities between Kamala Harris and the successor of Richard’s successor—which is to say, Prince Hal, who eventually becomes Henry V. If Harris wins tomorrow’s election, the parallel will be perfect since Hal is the son of Henry IV, who overthrew Richard.

 There are significant differences, of course, starting with the fact that Harris has not engaged in the kind of dissolute behavior we see in Hal. There are no Falstaffs in her life, not any hijinks in a forest. But Harris, like Hal, has emerged as a formidable leader after many wrote her off. I believe that, if the Democrats hold on to the Senate and flip the House, she could become the most consequential leader since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Like Prince Hal, Harris has kept her eye on the prize for a long time. Regarding Hal, we learn about his plans early in Henry IV, Part I. Shortly after we see him carousing with Falstaff and planning an elaborate prank, he surprises us with his famous soliloquy. Directed at his drinking companions, his words reveal that we shouldn’t underestimate him:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

And a few lines further on:

So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

To be sure, Harris hasn’t been deliberately hiding her bright metal on a sullen ground. But the vice-presidency has a way of functioning like “base contagious clouds,” smothering up quality. Although we may no longer regard the position as “not worth a bucket of warm piss” (as John Nance Garner, an FDR vice president, characterized it), it can still hide excellence. Only when Harris started running for president did many begin to see her potential.

To be fair, Joe Biden saw it, which is why he recommended her as her successor. In that way, he differs from Henry IV, who has all but given up on his son. Seeing “riot and dishonor” staining the brow of Hal, he fantasizes about exchanging him with Harry Percy, the flashy son of his soon-to-be-enemy Northumberland. “O that it could be proved,” he says longingly,

That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

So it’s not so much Biden that we should be thinking of as we read Henry’s disappointment but those Democrats who were rooting for anyone-but-Harris. Looking at Harris’s lackluster performance in the 2020 primaries—she dropped out before a single vote had been cast—they expressed disappointment not unlike that which Henry levels at Hal:

How could such inordinate and low desires,
Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts,
Such barren pleasures, rude society,
As thou art match’d withal and grafted to,
Accompany the greatness of thy blood
And hold their level with thy princely heart?

How could a woman with such “greatness of blood,” these Harris doubters wondered, be all but invisible in the first two years of her vice-presidency.

So far, however, Harris appears to have answered every challenge, just as Hal proves himself in battle, saving his father and defeating Hotspur. In the end, he receives his father’s grudging approval:

Stay, and breathe awhile:
Thou hast redeem’d thy lost opinion,
And show’d thou makest some tender of my life,
In this fair rescue thou hast brought to me.

There will be further conflict between Hal and Henry, especially at the end when the dying king thinks that Hal is eager to see him gone. Thinking his father dead and recalling how kingship has weighed him down—earlier in the play Henry has complained, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”–Hal takes the crown from his pillow. By the action, he means to signify that his father can be at rest now. Henry, however, awakes to find it gone and lays into his son. When Hal says, “I never thought to hear you speak again,” Henry replies,

Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought:
I stay too long by thee, I weary thee.
Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair
That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honors
Before thy hour be ripe?

Has Biden ever resented Harris for taking over the position he once thought should have been his? He would not be human if he didn’t feel some anger. But Harris, like Hal, has never shown any indication that she wanted to end Biden’s presidency prematurely, and Hal, like Harris with Biden, ends on good terms with the current occupant of the highest office. After Hal explains why he took the crown, Henry responds with the kind of fatherly sit-down chat that I can imagine Biden having with Harris:

Come hither, Harry, sit thou by my bed;
And hear, I think, the very latest counsel
That ever I shall breathe. 

Granted, Biden will not offer the kind of advice that Henry’s does: Hal, he says, should engage in foreign wars to distract the local feuding forces, a “wag the dog” strategy:

Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.

And indeed, we will see Henry V achieving something comparable in the next play, where suddenly we see the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish united under his banner as he prepares to fight the French at Agincourt.

Then again, the coalition that Harris has assembled to defeat Trump is potentially just as fractious, with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the same side as Liz and Dick Cheney. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 national-unity version of the drama played down the fractiousness between Fluellen, Jamy and MacMorris. After all, the United Kingdom was facing a fascist determined to end democracy.

In the play we see Henry V demonstrating the common touch as he relates to his soldiers, a quality that Harris has as well. All over the United States at the moment, Get Out the Vote (GOTV) captains are giving versions of Henry’s famous speech on the eve of his famous battle against the French:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage…

The speech concludes:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

Henry goes on to register one of England’s greatest victories.

May Harris resemble him in this as well.

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Ruth: Dreaming of a Sister of the Mind

By Robin Bates | Published: November 2, 2024
Thomas Matthews Rooke, The Story of Ruth (from a triptych)

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Sunday

Today the Old Testament lesson is drawn from the “Book of Ruth, the drama in which a widowed Moabite woman chooses to remain with her widowed mother-in-law rather than return to her own people and birth family. Ruth’s words to Naomi are themselves a poem and one of the most beloved passages in the Bible:

Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—
there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”

Poet Marge Piercy, returning to the book, is surprised by how much it focuses on “inheritance, lands, men’s names, how women must wiggle and wobble to live.” Yet despite that, the friendship is so powerful that it throws everything else into the shade. Piercy sees the relationship as a love story, which is why she includes Naomi in the title. At times in the poem, it’s not clear whether she’s talking about Ruth or Naomi although the answer is probably “both.”

Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, whose fabulously titled blog The Velveteen Rabbi alerted me to her anthology of Ruth poems, which includes this one by Piercy.

The Book of Ruth and Naomi
By Marge Piercy

When you pick up the Tanakh and read
the Book of Ruth, it is a shock
how little it resembles memory.
It’s concerned with inheritance,
lands, men’s names, how women
must wiggle and wobble to live.

Yet women have kept it dear
for the beloved elder who
cherished Ruth, more friend than
daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth
brought even the baby she made
with Boaz home as a gift.
Where you go, I will go too,
your people shall be my people,
I will be a Jew for you,
for what is yours I will love
as I love you, oh Naomi
my mother, my sister, my heart.

Show me a woman who does not dream
a double, heart’s twin, a sister
of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,
whose hair she can braid as her life
twists its pleasure and pain and shame.
Show me a woman who does not hide
in the locket of bone that deep
eye beam of fiercely gentle love
she had once from mother, daughter,
sister; once like a warm moon
that radiance aligned the tides
of her blood into potent order.

At the season of first fruits, we recall
two travelers, co-conspirators, scavengers
making do with leftovers and mill ends,
whose friendship was stronger than fear,
stronger than hunger, who walked together,
the road of shards, hands joined.

Further thought on Rachel Barenblatt – I love the title of Barenblatt’s blog, not only because it’s a clever pun, but because the theme of Margaret Sharpe’s The Velveteen Rabbit is that the more you love and are loved, the more real you become. By being carried around and played with as much as it is, the stuffed rabbit takes a beating. But rather than being diminished in the process, it becomes more precious. A toy horse explains the process:

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

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Remembering Our Loved Ones

By Robin Bates | Published: November 1, 2024
My son’s grave, which overlooks the spot where he drowned

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Friday

Julia and I are currently enjoying a mid-fall break in Ljubljana, where we have been teaching. Yesterday was Reformation Day, when the Slovenians (to quote Wikipedia) “commemorate the 16th century religious, cultural and political movement that played a key part in the development and promotion of Slovenian language and national identity.” Then today they celebrate All Saints Day, with families tending to the gravesites of departed loved ones.

We will do our own remembering today. Why Ljubljana is a special place to remember our oldest son Justin requires some explaining.

We brought our family here for a Fulbright year in 1987-88 (when it was still Yugoslavia) and then again in 1994-95. Our children attended the international programs in Slovenian schools, and Justin especially treasured the special passes that children get for the Ljubljana bus system. He reveled in the freedom it gave him, and he had all the routes memorized, making a point of traveling to both ends of every line by the end of our stay here. (I think there are 20 or so lines.) He also loved his classes at Gimnazia Bežigrad, and he enjoyed being the starring pitcher for a local baseball team, which won a competitive tournament in the Netherlands.

Therefore, when he died almost 25 years ago, we set up a memorial scholarship in his name. For 17 years now (except for the Covid years) we have been bringing Slovenian students to St. Mary’s College of Maryland and sending St. Mary’s students to Ljubljana. Up until we retired, the Slovenian students lived with us so we came to see them as family.

We reconnect with them when we return and—this is the point I want to make—we see them having the future that Justin didn’t have. I didn’t anticipate this added benefit when we set up the scholarship, which we established out of gratitude to Slovenia, but that’s how it has worked out.

Yesterday, for instance, we met up with Nina Kremžar, who was an English-Japanese double major when she attended St. Mary’s ten years ago. Nina credits the creative writing class she took at St. Mary’s (with poet and my former colleague Jeff Coleman) with jumpstarting her own creative writing, and she has gone on to win a major creative writing competition.

Nina has since published a book of poetry (the award for winning the competition), along with a book or short stories, and she is currently working on a children’s book. (All this in addition to teaching high school English and competing for Slovenia’s national curling team.) I told Nina how meaningful it was for to learn how the scholarship, which wouldn’t have existed had Justin not died, is having these ripple effects.

To remember Justin and all those we have loved and lost, here’s Christina Rossetti’s “Remember Me.” I imagine Justin addressing it to us and telling us it’s okay if we forget him for a while. We are just to use occasions like this and poems like this to remember “the vestige of the thoughts” he has left with us and to smile.

Remember Me
By Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
         Gone far away into the silent land;
         When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
         You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
         Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
         And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
         For if the darkness and corruption leave
         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
         Than that you should remember and be sad.

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Halloween: “Purring in My Haunted Ear”

By Robin Bates | Published: October 31, 2024

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Thursday – Halloween

For Halloween I’m sharing one of the scariest poems that I know. It’s about a childhood nightmare involving a cat that Robert Graves recalled after being wounded at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.

 Graves remembers being declared dead after his body was retrieved from “a crater by High Wood” and being loaded on board a train, which is when the dream came back to him. (For years after he was traumatized by trains.) It came back to him again when, in a morphine-induced state (and probably PTSD), his mind returned him to the battlefield.

A Child’s Nightmare
By Robert Graves

Through long nursery nights he stood
By my bed unwearying,
Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,
Purring in my haunted ear
That same hideous nightmare thing,
Talking, as he lapped my blood,
In a voice cruel and flat,
Saying for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”

That one word was all he said,
That one word through all my sleep,
In monotonous mock despair.
Nonsense may be light as air,
But there’s Nonsense that can keep
Horror bristling round the head,
When a voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”

He had faded, he was gone
Years ago with Nursery Land,
When he leapt on me again
From the clank of a night train,
Overpowered me foot and head,
Lapped my blood, while on and on
The old voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”

Morphia drowsed, again I lay
In a crater by High Wood:
He was there with straddling legs,
Staring eyes as big as eggs,
Purring as he lapped my blood,
His black bulk darkening the day,
With a voice cruel and flat,
“Cat!… Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…” he said, “Cat!… Cat!…”

When I’m shot through heart and head,
And there’s no choice but to die,
The last word I’ll hear, no doubt,
Won’t be “Charge!” or “Bomb them out!”
Nor the stretcher-bearer’s cry,
“Let that body be, he’s dead!”
But a voice cruel and flat
Saying for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!”

If one were to analyze this dream from a Jungian perspective, one could see the cat as a devouring anima figure, the warrior’s female side which becomes toxic when his male side seeks to suppress all that is effeminate. But no amount of analysis can counter the absolute terror found in the image.

Cat!…Cat!…Cat!

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Election Anxieties? Read Kipling’s “If”

By Robin Bates | Published: October 30, 2024
Rudyard Kipling

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Wednesday

On Monday, as I watched “the fearful bending of the knee” (Richard II) by the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, I posted Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Old Ironsides.” In the poem, the poet decries what he thought was the planned desecration of the fabled warship, the U.S.S. Constitution.

Dana Milbank, one of the many Washington Post columnists who protested owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to pull the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in deference to Donald Trump, has asked us to nevertheless keep faith with the newspaper. In his argument, he draws on Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.” More on that in a moment.

Although I have canceled subscriptions in the past, most notably the New York Times for its hatchet job on Hillary Clinton in 2016, I am swayed by the case Milbank makes.

He notes that Bezos has, before this, been a remarkably hands-off editor. And although the Post, like other major newspapers, has been guilty of sane-washing Trump, Bezos is no Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk. Since he bought the newspaper in 2013, Milbank notes,  it has won

18 Pulitzer prices, including for its coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, its exposure of Trump’s phony charitable work, revelations about secret surveillance at the National Security Agency and lapses at the Secret Service, and its reporting on police shootings, poverty, abortion, racial justice and climate change. Just two weeks ago, The Post won two Loeb Awards, the top prize in business journalism, including for my colleagues Heather Long and Sergio Peçanha’s editorials on post-pandemic revival of America’s downtowns. All three finalists in the commentary category were from The Post.

The problem is that such journalism is expensive. The paper lost $77 million last year, which only a billionaire like Bezos can shrug off.

The question is how the Post will behave in the future, and here’s where Kipling comes in. Milbank draws on one of Kipling’s lines about reliance in his inspiring poem “If”:

Those of us working in the news business for the last quarter century know what it’s like to “watch the things you gave your life to, broken/ And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools” as Kipling put it. For all its flaws, The Post is still one of the strongest voices for preserving our democratic freedoms.

Incidentally, “If” has other good advice for us in the final week of this election season. When you see people panicking and disagreeing, when you see political actors lying and hating, consider the following:

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…

And how about this for campaign volunteers pushing themselves to the limit to save democracy:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

And then there’s this rousing conclusion, which could use a gender addition but is otherwise perfect for the occasion:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,  
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Returning to the subject at hand, Milbank gives the go-ahead for canceling subscriptions if the Post does indeed become broken beyond repair. As he puts it,

If this turns out to be the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity — if journalists are ordered to pull their punches, called off sensitive stories or fired for doing their jobs — my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse.

But it’s not that broken yet, even with the sane-washing we have witnessed, and good pro-democratic work is still being done. Canceling subscriptions will not address the bigger issue, which is that Trump is trying to turn us into another Russia, where oligarchs kowtow to the strongman in charge. If we get to that point, we’ll have bigger issues than a pulled endorsement.

In the meantime, I leave you with these final sentiments, also drawn from the poem and which conclude with the line Milbank shares:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools…

When it comes to deciding who to vote for, this is no time for choosing the perfect (“dreams”) over the good (Voltaire) or letting ideology–“thoughts”–triumph over practical reality. Knaves, helped along by AI and Russian bots, are twisting the truth non-stop, and sometimes it may feel that democracy’s traditional tools have been broken. But whether or not we prevail in this election, the fight will go on. No Triumph and no Disaster is ever the final word.

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Our Lear Is Running to Be King Again

By Robin Bates | Published: October 29, 2024
George Frederick Bensell, King Lear

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Wednesday

I’m teaching King Lear today, and as Donald Trump, with each passing day, increasingly behaves like a mad ex-monarch, I thought I’d repost one of my essays comparing the two. There have been many such essays (as you will see by the links I provide at the end) but this should come as no surprise. Given that Lear is one of literature’s greatest depictions of a narcissist, it makes sense I would have turned to the play to get Trump’s measure.

The post reprinted below was written in the first six months of Trump’s presidency, and I must say that it holds up fairly well—except that, while Lear breaks out of his solipsistic prison to find love in the end, I’m more skeptical than I was in 2017 that Trump will ever escape.

There’s one other thing I noticed in rereading Lear, which is that the king’s loyal follower Kent is not unlike General Mark Milley or Liz Cheney, who have reminded us that members of the military and elected leaders swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. In Kent’s case, his loyalty is to the kingdom and so he remains faithful, not to Lear, but to King Lear. He is therefore willing to call out Lear–speak truth to power–for abandoning his kingship responsibilities, even though it gets him banished. And then to continue to serve King Lear, in disguise, despite the banishment.

Likewise, he calls out sycophantic followers in one of literature’s great invective rants. Think of Goneril’s steward Oswald as one of the grifters who will follow Trump as long as the former president commands an audience–and who will abandon him for another rightwing gravy train the moment that Trump no longer has sway:

Kent: Fellow, I know thee.
Oswald: What dost thou know me for.
Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

The following post was written, however, when the Oswalds of the world were feeling pretty good. And who were, as happens in the play, putting Republicans not loyal to Trump in metaphorical stocks.

Reprinted from May 31, 2017

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post comparing Donald Trump to King Lear. The more I think about it, the more disturbing the parallels appear.

To set up my further thoughts, I quote from a remarkable Rebecca Solnit article that pulls from Pushkin’s story of the golden fish, The Great Gatsby, and The Picture of Dorian Gray to capture the horror that is Trump. In her description one sees Lear as well:

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws [Alert! J. Alfred Prufrock reference] upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.

Lear too is possessed by “bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting.” Shakespeare’s tragedy gives us a picture of the damage Trump could do to America while also showing what it would take for Trump to find his soul again. (For Lear it requires imprisonment and the love of an estranged daughter.)

First of all, if you have any remaining hopes that Trump can grow into the role of president—that he can become presidential—look at Lear and forget about it. Lear’s narcissism is so profound that he is willing to plunge his country into civil war to deal with his insecurities.

Underlying all of Lear’s bluster is the fear that he is insignificant. He plays his “love” game because he suddenly realizes that all the power in the world won’t save him from aging and death. He knows deep down that he needs love but, since he is used to having everything his own way, he tries to get love on his own terms (to quote from Trump’s favorite movie Citizen Kane).

What he gets instead, of course, is people telling him what he wants to hear. Then, when he no longer has power, he discovers that all their words were empty. At that point, he can no longer evade his loneliness.

Solnit explains why tyrants are invariably lonely:

I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures…

Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.

This is why Cordelia refuses to go along with Lear’s game. She knows that true love involves give and take and she won’t participate in a charade. Give and take, as Solnit points out, is also how democracy works:

We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—if we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse, in which we are reminded that as we are beset with desires and fears and feelings, so are others; there was an old woman in Occupy Wall Street I always go back to who said, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” That’s what a democracy of mind and heart, as well as economy and polity, would look like.

Once Lear divides his kingdom into two, civil war is inevitable, and tensions between Cornwall and Albany arise immediately. We can note that Trump too has ridden divisiveness to the presidency and has made no attempt—as all previous presidents have done—to reach out to the other side. Incidentally, nothing terrified Shakespeare more than civil strife, which is present in practically all of his history plays and in a fair number of his tragedies. The horrors of his recent history, the War of the Roses and the Catholic-Protestant clashes, loomed large in his mind.

The good news for Trump is that even Lear gets his humanity and his soul back. It takes real adversity for it to happen, however, with his darkest moment proving to be his salvation. Only when he suffers does he learn what love is.

If Lear were given a choice between all his years as king and his last day, he would choose those final moments with Cordelia. Everything else seems trivial in comparison.

It seems strange to think that impeachment or imprisonment might be the best thing that could happen to Trump, but I think it might be true. Solnit talks about the deep yearning for limits that she saw with her fellow college students who came from wealthy families:

The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.

Maybe disgraced and rejected, Trump could find a genuine relationship with one of his children, laughing together at things they used to take seriously:

                                Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

As long as he continues to be buoyed by his enablers, however, Trump will remain in the hell of loneliness. One could feel sorry for him only, like Lear, he makes everyone around him pay for his unhappiness and, like Lear, he has the power to do a lot of damage.

Previous Posts on Trump, the GOP, and King Lear
Sept. 11, 2024: Harris’s Use of Goneril Tactics
Feb. 20, 2024: In Betraying Ukraine, Lindsey Graham Is an Oswald
Feb. 8, 2024: Trump’s Love Test Resembles Lear’s
Aug. 7, 2023: Lear, Trump Rage against Their Enemies
Nov. 9, 2020: Lear, Like Trump, Also Doesn’t Step Down Gracefully
July 13, 2020: Mary Trump and Jane Smiley on Dysfunctional Families
June 22, 2020: Trump and Lear, Addicted to Praise
June 10, 2020: Trump as Low Rent Lear
March 28, 2018: Battered by a Raging Stormy
March 14, 2018: Trump and Lear: Corruption Starts at the Top
Dec. 14, 1014: Trump and the GOP as Shakespearean Drama
June 13, 2017: Trump’s Cabinet as Goneril and Regan
March 30, 2017: Will Trump, Like Lear, Take Us All Down?
March 21, 2017: Trump as Lear, Howling in the Storm
March 10, 2016: #NeverTrump! Never! Never! Never! Never?
May 9, 2016: Time for GOP Moderates To Go to Ground?
May 8, 2016: Now, Gods, Stand Up for Trump!
Dec. 30, 2015: Conservative Extremists as King Lear

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Washington Post, a Harpy of the Shore

By Robin Bates | Published: October 28, 2024
Gordon Grant, Old Ironsides

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Monday

To ward off fascism, the number one rule of Yale historian and authoritarianism expert Tim Snyder is “Do not obey in advance.” Snyder points out that, when Hitler came to power, most Germans voluntarily surrendered their allegiance to him. He observes that

doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate. You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have.

Unfortunately, the owners of the Washington Post and the L.A. Times are already doing just that, breaking with custom by refusing to endorse a presidential candidate in this most consequential of elections. In the process they are trashing the reputations of two of journalism’s crown jewels. The Post, which once exposed corruption at the highest levels, has suddenly capitulated to a dictator wannabe, perhaps because owner Jeff Bezos is worried that Trump’s plan to levy tariffs will devastate Amazon. Maybe he thinks that if he plays nice with Trump now, Trump will back off if he regains office.

The Post’s best columnists are in full revolt—apparently the editorial endorsing Kamala Harris was being penned when Bezos pulled it—and the editorial page editor of the L.A. Times resigned as well after its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, pulled the same stunt.

When push comes to shove, in other words, billionaire newspaper owners will abandon their sacred trust and put their commercial interests first. So much for the Times’s declaration that “our mission is to inform, engage and empower.” Or the Post’s that “democracy dies in darkness.”

People have been pointing out that the corporate media has been sane-washing Trump for a while now, and these editorial decisions make clear the reason why. Editorial boards, even when faced with a fascist who attempted a coup, have been trying to hold off their owners.

In the end, sadly, all that placating has come to naught.

I think of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s rage when he heard (erroneously, as it turned out) that another fabled institution was about to be desecrated. In 1830 the Boston Globe mistakenly reported that the U.S.S. Constitution—a.k.a. Old Ironsides—was going to be scrapped. Holmes’s poem helped make sure that the fabled warship would be saved from the scrap heap, and it is now the oldest commissioned naval warship still afloat.

We need such poems today to save our newspapers. Here’s the poem:

Old Ironsides
By Oliver Wendell Holmes

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
   Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
   That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
   And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
   Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
   Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
   And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
   Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
   The eagle of the sea!

O, better that her shattered hulk
   Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
   And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
   Set every thread-bare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,—
   The lightning and the gale!

The Washington Post was a meteor of the ocean air when it took on Richard Nixon, and it has done notable service since. This time, however, harpies of the shore have gotten to it. Plucking eagles is a specialty of Trump-enabling billionaires.

Update: Jonathan Last of the Bulwark informs us that it’s not tariffs but a rocket company that Bezos is worried about–and that he knows that “bending the kneed to Trump” is a smart play with no downside:

What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.

And Last adds,

The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.

Bezos has therefore “sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.”

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