A.I. and the Tech Bro Accelerationists

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2025
Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein

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Friday

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, the Silicon Valley tech bros who support Donald Trump have more surprises for us. The other day the New York Times breathlessly reported,

Meta is said to be preparing to unveil an A.I. lab dedicated to a hypothetical system that exceeds the powers of the human brain

To which Tobias Wilson-Bates, my English professor son who studies A.I., replied with a literary passage you’re probably can identify:

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.

Not too much blessing—in fact, mostly undiluted cursing—occurs in Victor Frankenstein’s subsequent account of his technological breakthrough. For instance, here’s what his creation has to say:

“Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”

There’s no sign that Mark Zuckerberg has any qualms about what he’s attempting, and thanks to Greg Olear at the substack blog Prevail, I now have a word for what he’s up to—accelerationism—which Olear succinctly sums up as, “All gas, no brakes.”

Andy Beckett, British historian and Guardian journalist, describes the accelerationist philosophy:

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified—either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favor automation. They favor the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favor the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

 Beckett observes that the accelerationists run afoul of

conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.

They also don’t appear interested in Mary Shelley’s warning.

Speaking for the environment, Olear quotes Lady Macbeth, employing sarcasm to reveal accelerationism’s consequences:

What is the accelerationist attitude toward climate change? In the words of Lady Macbeth, “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.” Since humans are going to eventually destroy the earth’s habitability regardless, we might as well get a move on. Only when we’ve extracted all the fossil fuels from the ground, and all the “raw earth” minerals we need for our technological devices, will we understand what to do next. Therefore, accelerate the melting of the icecaps so we can drill baby drill in the Arctic Ocean! (To understand why Trump and Vance are so fixated on Greenland, just look at a map.) And if a lot of peasants and serfs and hoi polloi bite the dust in the process, so be it; we can always make more.

Olear points out that the Italian Futurists in the first decade of the 20th century embraced an early version of accelerationism and finds it no surprise that some of them would go on to embrace Mussolini fascism. In the famous 1909 Futurist manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Olear notes,

we find the seeds of the “manosphere” movement and the war on “wokeness,” inchoate accelerationism, and the inherent cruelty of a cult that values technology more than individual human life.

Marinetti’s manifesto called for poets to “sing the love of danger, the habit of energy, and the strength of daring,” and said that “the essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolution.” He embraced the beauty of the automobile, asserting that it is our version of ancient Greek statuary:

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racecar adorned with great tail-pipes like serpents with explosive breath, a roaring sports car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

While some of Mainetti’s points don’t sound too bad–for instance, that the poet “must spend himself with warmth, glamour, and prodigality to enhance the fervent urgency of the primordial elements”–the manifesto gets darker as it goes along. Article #9 declares, “We glorify war—the only true antidote for the world—and with it, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.” In article #10 we read, “We want to demolish museums and libraries, and oppose morality, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice.”

Recall that World War I is only five years in the future, followed immediately by Mussolini’s rise. Olear notes that Marinetti, “like his friend Ezra Pound, wound up being an apologist for autocracy and a tool of the totalitarian state.”

“Small wonder, he concludes, “the titans of Silicon Valley lined up behind Trump at the inauguration.”

Olear is careful to note that he is not against technological innovation and that science and religion don’t have to be yolked to an authoritarian agenda. For that matter, there can be anti-technocratic authoritarianism, as we see in Robert Kennedy’s war against vaccines, one of science’s greatest gifts to humanity. There were also Nazi environmentalists dreaming of pure nature. No less than accelerationism, extremist ideology, whether right or left, strips human beings of their humanity.

Novels like Frankenstein, by contrast, honor our humanity. Mary Shelley has given us a powerful forum to explore the moral, social, and political dimensions of our choices. In the light of such understanding, we stand a better chance of making wise decisions.

All gas and no braking, on the other hand, allows no room for reflection.

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The Song of Angry Americans

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2025
Still from Les Misérables

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Thursday

Kudos to Reuters News Service for its strategic juxtaposition, delivered deadpan, in an article on Trump’s plan to attend Les Misérables last night:

Trump’s appearance at Les Misérables, a show about citizens rising up against their government, comes just days after he sent U.S. Marines and the National Guard to quell protests against his administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles. First lady Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance will also attend.

Will the president connect “the songs of angry men” who vow to “not be slaves again” with the thousands of protesters who are expected to participate in the “No Kings” demonstrations this Saturday? Even in our rural and very red Tennessee county we will be assembling. In April we drew between 200-300 in our “Hands Off” protest (as in “Hands off our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid”) as we assembled across from the federal office building in Winchester, Tennessee, and I can imagine similar numbers this time around. I’ll report back on Monday.

“No Kings Day” organizers are very clear that the protests, in the spirit of Martin Luther King, must be peaceful—Trump is salivating over the prospect of military confrontation—so the passages from Victor Hugo’s novel don’t entirely fit. The Paris Revolution of 1832, which Hugo witnessed directly, was violent and was violently put down, with revolutionaries lined up and summarily shot when captured (as occurs in the novel). Still, the vision of insurrection leader Enjolras is one that Saturday’s protesters will be embracing as he speaks for democracies everywhere.

I’ve applied these passages in the past to the Ukrainians resisting Vladimir Putin and to freedom movements in Hong Kong, Myanmar, and elsewhere. (I’ve repurposed those posts here.) Little did I know that I would one day be applying them to an attempted fascist takeover in my own country. Here’s Enjolras:

Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!

Enjolras declares that the meaning of the struggle is self-determination or “sovereignty of myself over myself”:

Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.

Following a mini lecture on the social contract, Enjolras sets forth a Jeffersonian vision of the importance of education. Think of such education as a guard against the mendacity and brainwashing that the Trump White House and Fox News engage in daily:

[L]egally speaking, [equality] is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.

Yes, light! light! everything comes from light!

To our sorrow, we know Enjolras’s next prediction will not occur. The 20th century, rather than being happy, will be one of the bloodiest in history. Nevertheless, the ideal he voices is one that activists have never ceased striving for. And to give Enjolras credit, from World War II up until now, the European Union and NATO have accomplished some of what he envisions while various minority rights movements have changed the landscape of civilized society (which of course is what so infuriates Trump and his supporters). Here’s Enjolras:

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as today, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.

Another thing that Enjolras couldn’t foresee is that some people would become bored with freedom, choosing a leader who delights in taking it away once fears of invasion and famine had abated. Complacency set in as we forgot how precious and how fragile, democracy can be.

Enjolras’s address concludes with assurances that we need to hear. Whatever we sacrifice to protect freedom, he tells us, will not be in vain:

Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of Ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the Ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: ‘I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.’ From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

Americans have it lucky: on Saturday, people will not need to die to affirm our belief in our constitutional republic. The more of us who turn out, the more chance we have of saving the one we’ve got.

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Without Literature, No Freedom

By Robin Bates | Published: June 10, 2025
Gustave Doré, Ezra Reads the Law to the People

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Wednesday

My friend Dennis Johnson recently alerted me to a powerful commencement address, delivered by the accomplished novelist Nicole Krauss and published in the Washington Post. Author of The History of Love and The Great House, both of which I highly recommend, Krauss argues that literature is essential if humans are to step into freedom and live up to our potential.

Krauss grounds her case in a powerful historical moment. When the Jews were captives in Babylon, they had turned to writing and transcribing the Torah because they had no access to their land or their Temple. Upon their return to Jerusalem, the question was whether they were going to be a people of the Temple or a people of the Torah. Krauss describes what happened next:

[I]t is in Nehemiah that we read of something truly extraordinary: the first record of the Torah being read in public. Ezra brought the scroll out and read from it, “facing the square before the Water Gate, from the first light until midday, to the men and the women and those who could understand; the ears of all the people were given to the scroll of the Torah. … They read from [it], translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading.”

Krauss says that “it is impossible to exaggerate how momentous this moment was”:

 At perhaps the greatest juncture the Jews have ever faced, the Temple was replaced by Torah. Sacrifice was replaced by reading, teaching and study. And Judaism was made independent of place and became portable, ensuring its survival to this day.

Not only did Judaism become portable but the first steps towards democratization had been taken. As Krauss explains it,

In those few lines of Nehemiah, we find a rejection of a hierarchical system based on hereditary power in the hands of the few, toward the town square, where all men and women are offered the chance to participate, to listen, learn and understand the teachings for themselves. It might be argued that from that day on, all that is required to live as a Jew are words. No more, and no less.

This is where the importance of writing comes in. Krauss says that she writes, just as she reads, because she believes that

in the realm of literature we are, each of us, free. Free to imagine, to invent, to change our minds, to travel through time, across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to do what I don’t believe can be done in any other realm, medium or dimension: to step into the mind of another. Feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy.

To intrude into Krauss’s argument for a moment, in my book Better Living through Literature I make the case that the 19th century Romantic Imagination expanded the franchise in a similar way. When a poet like Wordsworth began to make shepherds, leech gatherers, and wheat gatherers the subjects of his verse, he opened the door for poets and writers

to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Emile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on….[T]he Romantic Imagination elevated lower-class figures to new levels of importance. In the process, it inspired generations of social and political idealists and changed conversations about public policy.

Krauss, however, adds one major caveat to her argument that literature is “fundamentally democratic.” “To access its freedoms,” she writes, “we must be taught to read, value and engage with literature.” She sees us standing at a crossroads where the future of reading, writing, and literature is at stake, along with “all of the expansive freedom they have afforded us.”

Concerned about AI and “the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with a book,” she worries that we

have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share.

Writing and reading take effort, she points out, and without that effort “we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.”

She takes heart, however, from all the professors who make it their life work to ensure that their students “have access to the freedom that comes with becoming a reader, being able to write for oneself, and partake in a culture of literature and ideas.” (Remember, this is a commencement address.) She also takes the long view, noting that, after all, we have been finding words for ourselves and have been writing our own story for thousands of years. In the process, we “have done something far more radical than expressed ourselves: We have invented ourselves. We have asked the essential question: Who are we, and what kind of people do we want to be?”

“Where there is destruction,” she concludes, “there is also the potential for tikkun, for repair.” To rise to the occasion, however, we must be educated “in the bonding of language and meaning.”

Authors, teachers, librarians, parents, bloggers, social workers, therapists, friends, and others are critical to making this educational bonding happen.

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Darkness at Noon in Trump’s America

By Robin Bates | Published: June 9, 2025

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Tuesday

In Trumpism’s assault on democracy, the name Curtis Yarvin keeps appearing. Ava Kovman’s recent New Yorker profile identifies him as the guru of rightwing Silicon Valley oligarchs, especially former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, and Yarvin appears to have shaped the thinking of Vice President J.D. Vance. Essentially Yarvin believes that autocracy is preferable to democracy, and he would like to see the world (including the United States) divided into fiefdoms run by billionaires.

Normally people with Yarvin’s views would be shrugged off, but with rightwing billionaires playing an ever-increasing role in American politics, it’s important to know the ideology they espouse.

As I read the Yarvin profile, I thought of Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940), which focuses on Stalin’s purge of Bolshevik intellectuals (although Stalin is never named, referred to only as No. 1). And that book came to mind because of a perfect putdown of Yarvin by author Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted,

over-all takeaway from the Curtis Yarvin profile is that there must be millions of smart-aleck show-offy kids who annoy their teachers & go on to annoy other adults through their lives with their “contrarian” pose that hardens to a carapace over their faces; until, as adults, they still harbor a delusion that, if there is a king, or a fűhrer, he’d be impressed with the guy’s motor mouth & appoint him to his cabinet rather than deleting him with a negligent swipe of his wrist as Stalin did routinely.

Oates’s slam reminds me of blogger John Rogers’s well-known depiction of Ayn Rand fans (who include a number of Silicon Valley oligarchs):

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

To show what Oates is responding to, here’s Yarvin’s opinion on authoritarian regimes:

Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

I suppose there’s some comfort that Yarvin can’t bring himself to openly endorse mass killing or genocide, but he comes close:

Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

So the problem with genocide is not that it’s immoral, inhumane, and abhorrent but that there’s a “moral stigma” attached. In other words, it’s got a public relations problem. It’s worth remembering that the Nazis originally defended concentration camps as a humane way of segregating out people they regarded as undesirable (Roma, homosexuals, the neurodiverse, Jews, socialists, and communists). Unfortunately, dehumanizing a certain population—as we are seeing–can lead to suspension of habeas corpus, illegal deportation to concentration camps abroad, and military intervention to quash protests. It’s not hard to see the logical end as mass murder. Or, to use Yarvin’s weasel word, cancellation.

Darkness at Noon is about a former Bolshevik revolutionary that is imprisoned and tried for treason by the government he helped set up. In Oates’s phrasing, he is deleted with a negligent swipe of Stalin’s wrist. However, whereas Yarvin is essentially a troll and bullshit artist—one whom unfortunately various powerful men take seriously—Rubashov is an introspective revolutionary who is now tormented by various ethical choices he made in the past. The supposedly necessary violence meant to usher in a just and prosperous society has instead led to unimaginable misery:

So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labor in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indochina.

His interrogator and former comrade Ivanov, by contrast, tells him that the ends justify the means and only weak-minded humanists think one can avoid tough choices:

There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community–which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.

The difference between Rubashov and Yarvin—what makes the literary character more interesting than the actual man—is that he reflects. “The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost,” he writes in his journal. Yarvin, who talks incessantly, appears to ascribe to the Trumpian imperative, “Never admit you’re wrong. Never apologize.”

Trumpism has declared war on science, on critical thinking, and on empathy, ad figures like Yarvin are providing an intellectual-sounding justification, however bogus, for its attacks. Literature helps keep us grounded in the true and the good as we resist.

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The Brownings’ Marriage–and My Own

By Robin Bates | Published: June 8, 2025
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Monday

My faculty reading group has been discussing the poetry of Robert Browning, and as yesterday was Julia’s and my 52nd wedding anniversary, I share today a marriage love poem written to him by his spouse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love you, let me count the ways” is one of the best-known love poems—is there anyone who hasn’t encountered its opening line?—but it takes on special meaning when you think of it as arising out of a marriage.

Robert and Elizabeth married over the strenuous objection of her father—he disinherited her—and Robert persuaded her to publish Sonnets of the Portuguese, which she feared were too personal. One of his pet names for her was “my little Portuguese,” which explains the title.

Speaking from my own experience, there are times in marriage when one experiences oceanic feelings of love and times when one experiences moments of quiet tenderness. Barrett Browning touches on both. She knows that her love for her husband has stretched her soul beyond physical parameters—beyond depth and breadth and height—but also that this love dwells in “every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” Any number of domestic moments could behind her declaration that “I love thee with the breath,/ Smiles, tears, of all my life.” This love she associates with humankind’s noblest ends—“I love thee freely, as men strive for right”—and knows that it transcends the egotistical self: she love purely, not transactionally, not for praise.

It sounds as though she may once have lost her childhood religious faith—she mentions “lost saints”—but she remembers the passionate immersion of that time, and now regards marital love and divine love as indistinguishable. Love, after all, is the foundation—”the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” as Dante puts it—and this love is at once domestic and divine.

And because it is, she can imagine it transcending death itself. “If God choose, I shall but love thee better after death,” she writes.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

The poem has traveled quite a distance from the poet’s initial claim that she will be enumerating love’s aspects. The matter-of-fact opening contrasts with, and therefore serves to accentuate, the way that love refuses to be confined by time, space, or life itself.

So happy anniversary, my dear. My love for you over these 52 years—53 actually—has deepened and expanded in ways I could never have imagined.

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Something Green in a Dry, Barren Heart

By Robin Bates | Published: June 7, 2025

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Pentecost Sunday

Franciscan priest Murray Bodo has written the following lyric for Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost was the moment when the disciples understood, in a visceral way, that the God of love dwells in us as He/She dwelt in Jesus. Like John Donne, the Bodo plays with the pun “sun/son,” capturing the miraculous reversal of life and death as we understand them (“the sun rising at sunset”). Searching for “a horizon to free my mind from prison,” the speaker experiences “a crack of light happening.”

The final line reminds me of Mary Oliver’s conclusion in “Crossing the Swamp,” amongst my  favorites of her poems. After wading through “pathless, seamless, peerless mud”—her own road to calvary, one could say–she describes herself as a “poor dry stick

           given
one more chance by the whims
                   of swamp water— a bough
                           that still, after all these years,
could take root,
           sprout, branch out, bud–
                  make of its life a breathing
                            palace of leaves.

Bodo, meanwhile, detects, “out of the dry, barren heart/ the shoot of something green.”

Still Movement (Motets I-V for Pentecost Sunday)
By Murray Bodo

You have gone the way you came
burning in and out of the dark.

My eye searches for a horizon
to free my mind from prison.

The day, gray with backward growing,
the sun rising at sunset.

And you return the way you left,
a crack of light happening:

Out of the dry, barren heart
the shoot of something green.

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Trump=Gingham Dog, Musk=Calico Cat

By Robin Bates | Published: June 6, 2025

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Saturday

Because I don’t want to pay too much attention to Trump-Musk spat—“A plague on both your houses,” I hear Mercutio saying—but also because I don’t want to waste a perfect poem for the feud, I’m writing a rare Saturday post. The featured poem is Eugene Field’s “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat,” a gem that I remember from my childhood:

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’ other had slept a wink!
      The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
      Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
            (I wasn’t there; I simply state
            What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went “Bow-wow-wow!”
And the calico cat replied “Mee-ow!”
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
      While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
      Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
            (Now mind: I’m only telling you
            What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, “Oh, dear! what shall we do!”
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
      Employing every tooth and claw
      In the awfullest way you ever saw—
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
            (Don’t fancy I exaggerate—
            I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
      But the truth about the cat and pup
      Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
            (The old Dutch clock it told me so,
            And that is how I came to know.)

To borrow from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, our own gingham dog has the nuclear codes while our own calico cat has access to all our personal data. Good riddance if they were to eath each other up.

Sadly, I don’t think this is the outcome we can expect. Rather, as has been the case with Vladimir Putin and his former oligarch buddies, most of the power lies with the head of government. Trump is already threatening to cancel Musk’s government contracts, and while such a personalized threat is blatantly corrupt—just as his major campaign contributor getting special favors was blatantly corrupt—that won’t stop the president. Nor will the GOP Congress intervene. Odds are that Musk will either come groveling back or he will be crushed while Trump emerges more powerful than ever.

Entertaining though it may be to watch the air be littered with bits of gingham and calico, therefore, I expect that, by maybe as early as next week, we can expect at least one and possibly both figures to be sitting in their customary positions on the table.

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Trump, Musk, and Little Black Sambo

By Robin Bates | Published: June 5, 2025
Helen Bannerman, Little Black Sambo

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Friday

When I was a young child, one of my favorite books was Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo (1899). I forced my parents to read it to me over and over, and to this day I have parts of it memorized. Unfortunately, the fact that “Sambo” became a racial slur means that I haven’t been able to read it to my grandchildren, which is a pity because its plot is great for enhancing a child’s self-esteem. In the course of the story we see Sambo outwit five tigers, each of which threatens to devour him.

Sambo must bargain away his fine suit of clothes, piece by piece, to escape. By the end, however, not only has he retrieved his clothes, but he has entirely turned the tables. He himself has become the devourer.

I’ll explain how in a moment, but I need to explain why I’m bringing it up. At present, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man are having a spectacular falling out after having had—briefly to be sure—what MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace describes as “the most corrupt and superficial relationship in American history.” While the relationship held, they managed to do untold damage to America, but now their competing narcissism has led to a conflagration. No one is sure where this one ends.

Now to the story. Sambo is walking proudly through the jungle since his parents have bestowed upon him a fine set of clothes, including a “pair of shoes with crimson soles and crimson linings” and a large green umbrella. When each tiger threatens our hero—“Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up”—Sambo gives away first his “beautiful little red coat,” then his “beautiful little blue trousers,” then his shoes, and finally his umbrella. When the last two tigers initially reject his offer (two shoes for four feet, no way for a tiger to hold an umbrella), Sambo quickly comes up with ingenious solutions.

As each of the tigers strives off with one of Sambo’s possessions, he proudly announces, “Now I’m the grandest Tiger in the Jungle.”

Which, of course, is how both Trump and Musk see themselves. And as in the story, there’s room for only one grandest tiger.

The consoling message here, for those dispirited at how the country we love is being trashed, is that we have but to wait. The destroyers will destroy themselves. Here’s what Sambo witnesses from his hiding place behind a tree:

[H]e saw all the Tigers fighting, and disputing which of them was the grandest. And at last they all got so angry that they jumped up and took off all the fine clothes, and began to tear each other with their claws, and bite each other with their great big white teeth.

At this point, each tiger grabs another tiger’s tail, leading to a climactic conclusion:

And the Tigers were very, very angry, but still they would not let go of each other’s tails. And they were so angry, that they ran round the tree, trying to eat each other up, and they ran faster and faster, till they were whirling round so fast that you couldn’t see their legs at all.

And they still ran faster and faster and faster, till they all just melted away, and there was nothing left but a great big pool of melted butter (or “ghi,” as it is called in India) round the foot of the tree.

Sambo gets his clothes back and his father, returning from work, collects the ghi in a big brass pot he happens to be carrying. In her turn, Sambo’s mother uses it for pancakes. In this eating drama, Sambo gets the last bite:

And then they all sat down to supper. And Black Mumbo ate Twenty-seven pancakes, and Black Jumbo ate Fifty-five but Little Black Sambo ate a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry.

Sadly, winning back America will take more that watching its oligarchs fight amongst themselves. Still, the two are exposing vulnerabilities that patriots can exploit.

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Budget Cutters vs. Art

By Robin Bates | Published: June 4, 2025
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa

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Thursday

I’ve become a fan of Joseph Fasano, who posts many of his poems on Bluesky. As the GOP tries to ram its billionaire bill through Congress while cutting everything that is of worth, it’s nice to have two poems calling out these vultures.

Both poems approach the subject from a child’s point of view. Many of us can remember being Fasano’s “child with a light” who reads beneath the covers. I think of the line early in John’s Gospel (1:5): “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” We’re seeing a lot of uncomprehending darkness in MAGA these days.

For Those Who Try to Cut Funding for the Arts
By Joseph Fasano

I know
you won’t be reading this anyway.
But maybe,
alone under the covers,
a child with a light
in the darkness
is opening
the first words of a story,
a story that your hands
would try to close now.
Whatever you do
for the darkness
that child with the light will survive you.

The theme of darkness continues in the second poem, and I like how Fasano associates the GOP looters (thanks Ayn Rand for that label) with the dark arts. The poem feels vaguely familiar as I’ve been reading A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which opens with an impoverished child so enamored of art that he hides out in the British Museum, undergoing hunger and cold in order to sketch the treasures he finds there.

For Those Who Defund the Arts as a Political Weapon
By Joseph Fasano

You can waste your life on the dark arts.
But the soul in you knows what matters.
Like the boy who broke into the Louvre
and was found alone in the morning, asleep
beside the Mona Lisa.
He said  she looked like his mother.

They led him back
to the orphanage–
to his century, to his little cot, his life.

Listen. A heart is what you do with it.
The world will give us sieges
and great plagues
and prophets of doom and ruin,
but who will be there for that child
who hacks for days at the window-lock
and only wants comfort
and immensity
and the smile that cannot die

What shall we do with the hearts we have been given? Those who lock them down imprison the child within, who longs for comfort and immensity and “the smile that cannot die?”

Note: Fasano’s most recent collection of poetry is The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024).

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