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Wednesday – Rosh Hashanah
As I was searching for a poem for Judaism’s celebration of its new year, which begins today, I came across a wonderful selection of appropriate lyrics assembled by one Rebekah Lowin. Lowin has not limited herself to Jewish poets as she shares lyrics capturing the freshness of leaving behind the past and beginning again.
The poem I’ve chosen I’ve shared once before on this occasion. In “i am running into a new year,” Lucille Clifton appears to be referring to her 46th birthday. A birthday, like a new year, is an opportunity to look back over one’s life and take stock. Thus, the poem is very much in the spirit of the High Holy Days, when sins of the past year are acknowledged and released.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, however, give observers a yearly opportunity to review the past twelve months whereas Clifton sounds like she’s had certain things on her mind for at least 30 years. These appear to involve excessive self-criticism and broken promises to herself.
Still, better late than never to move past such self-harm. Here’s the poem:
i am running into a new year by Lucille Clifton
i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twentysix and thirtysix even thirtysix but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me
What is she loving and leaving? Perhaps some of the self-limiting myths she has lived with for decades, myths that are so bound up with her sense of herself that it feels like a betrayal to let them go. They catch in her hair “like strong fingers.”
The joy expressed in the poem gives us hope that Clifton really will break free this time. May observers this coming week experience that same exhilarating sense of renewal.
Note: I will be traveling over the next couple of days so blog posts will be appearing at irregular times. By Wednesday Julia and I will be settled down in Slovenia, where I have a six-week stint teaching at the University of Ljubljana. More on that in future posts.
Tuesday
Watching the devastating impact of Hurricane Helene on Swannanoa, North Carolina—the town was literally swept away—is our most recent reminder of the havoc that lies in store for us as the world heats up. While Donald Trump and Project 2025 claim that climate change is a hoax—and propose measures that will make it even worse—Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina are witnesses to the latest instance of what happens when the Gulf of Mexico becomes abnormally warm. And this, as the world knows to its sorrow, is only one of the extreme weather events that we humans have unleashed upon ourselves with our excessive hydrocarbons.
As climate scientists—“mad-eyed from stating the obvious” (to quote from the poem I share today)—search for ways to communicate the horrors that are in store for us, poet Richard Wilbur has some advice. To be sure, “Advice to a Prophet” is speaking of nuclear annihilation rather than climate change, but the poem’s advice still holds.
As Wilbur sees it, warning about “weapons, their force and range,/ The long numbers that rocket the mind” doesn’t effectively communicate the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Wilbur observes that, in the face of such language, our “slow, unreckoning hearts” may be “left behind, unable to fear what is too strange.” Perhaps the same happens when climate scientists warn about glacier melt or sea level rise.
Instead, Wilbur says, our doomsday prophets should speak of “the world’s own change.” After all, we know what it’s like to see the world being degraded before our eyes. “Though we cannot conceive/Of an undreamt thing,” the poet notes, “we know to our cost/ How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,/ How the view alters.”
As I watch television footage of trees being swept away in the deluge, I think of Wilbur’s jack-pine losing “its knuckled grip on the cold ledge.” And while the hurricane-maddened rivers aren’t killing all the “gliding trout” the way a nuclear blast would, they have been claiming other victims. When Wilbur asks whether we will understand what it means to be “lofty and long standing/ When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close,” I think of those other trees that climate change is killing, whether through insects migrating north or (in the tropics) through dehydration.
Here’s the poem:
Advice to a Prophet By Richard Wilbur
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?— The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone’s face?
Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
Xanthus, incidentally, is the mythical river that rose up in horror from all the Trojan bodies that Achilles, in his wrath, was casting into it. As its waves attempted to drown the Greek warrior, the Greek god Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, sent down holy fire, forcing the river to retreat. In other words, it’s a powerful image to use by a poet warning of nuclear Armageddon. It also works well to capture how modern technology is upsetting the natural order.
Here’s a heartening observation for those worried sick about Donald Trump being returned to power. Ryan Teague Beckwith of MSNBC’s newsletter puts the ex-president in the same category as two literary washed-up salesmen, observing, “There’s nothing sadder than an aging salesman trying to close one last deal.”
The salesmen he mentions are Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman and Shelly Levene of Glengarry Glen Ross, and he also throws “poor ol’ Gil“ from The Simpsons into the mix.
The scenes he has in mind are Loman “desperately trying to get that desk job” and Levene “pleading with his office manager for ‘the good leads.’” Beckwith writes that Trump has lately been reaching “new peaks of sweaty salesmanship on the campaign trail as he seeks to turn around a race that he appears to believe he could lose”:
Trump’s campaign has reached the “But wait, there’s more!” phase of the infomercial, as he has recently tossed off promises to abolish taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security; make in-vitro fertilization free to patients; cap credit card interest rates; cut car insurance rates and restore the state and local tax deduction in addition to the campaign agenda he already outlined.
Here are passages of Loman and Levene pleading. Loman has just learned that he is being “let go” by his old boss’s son after having given his life to the company. As you read them, imagine Loman and Levene as Trump pleading with an American public that has become weary of his shenanigans and that is beginning to walk out of his rallies:
Willie: I’m talking about your father! There were promises made across this desk! You mustn’t tell me you’ve got people to see — I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit! (After a pause.) Now pay attention. Your father — in 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions.
HOWARD (impatiently): Now, Willy, you never averaged…
WILLY (banging his hand on the desk): I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in the year of 1928! And your father came to me — or rather, I was in the office here — it was right over this desk — and he put his hand on my shoulder…
HOWARD (getting up): You’ll have to excuse me, Willy, I gotta see some people. Pull yourself together.
And here’s Levene begging for precious leads on houses in an upscale development. He’s talking to his supervisor in a Chinese restaurant:
LEVENE John…John…John. Okay. John. John. Look: (pause) The Glengarry Highland’s leads, you’re sending Roma out. Fine. He’s a good man. We know what he is. He’s fine. All I’m saying, you look at the board, he’s throwing…wait, wait, wait, he’s throwing them away, he’s throwing the leads away. All that I’m saying, that you’re wasting leads. I don’t want to tell you your job. All that I’m saying, things get set, I know they do, you get a certain mindset… A guy gets a reputation. We know how this…all I’m saying, put a closer on the job. There’s more than one man for the… Put a…wait a second, put a proven man out…and you watch, now wait a second–and you watch your dollar volumes…You start closing them for fifty ‘stead of twenty- five…you put a closer on the…
WILLIAMSON Shelly, you blew the last…
LEVENE No. John. No. Let’s wait, let’s back up here, I did…will you please? Wait a second. Please. I didn’t “blow” them. No. I didn’t “blow” them. No. One kicked out, one I closed…
WILLIAMSON …you didn’t close…
LEVENE …I, if you’d listen to me. Please. I closed the cocksucker. His ex, John, his ex, I didn’t know he was married…he, the judge invalidated the…
The desperation of both men anticipates their demise. Loman commits suicide while Levene is caught stealing the precious leads and faces possible jail time. If Trump’s current desperation turns out to be well-founded, the second prospect awaits him as well.
The other day I was thumbing through Harold Bloom’s anthology American Religious Poetry and came across an Anthony Hecht poem that caught my fancy. “Saul and David” refers to the episode in 1 Samuel 16 where Saul is haunted by an evil spirit and assuaged by David’s lyre playing:
Now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil[a] spirit from the Lord tormented him. Saul’s attendants said to him, “See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the lyre. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes on you, and you will feel better.”
So Saul said to his attendants, “Find someone who plays well and bring him to me.” One of the servants answered, “I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the lyre. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the Lord is with him.”
Then Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, “Send me your son David, who is with the sheep.” So Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine and a young goat and sent them with his son David to Saul….Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.
Here’s the poem:
Saul and David By Anthony Hecht
It was a villainous spirit, snub-nosed, foul Of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent, That squatted within him wheresoever he went And possessed the soul of Saul.
There was no peace on pillow or on throne. In dreams the toothless, dwarfed, and squinny-eyed Started a joyful rumor that he had died Unfriended and alone.
The doctors were confounded. In his distress, he Put aside arrogant ways and condescended To seek among the flocks where they were tended By the youngest son of Jesse,
A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon, Unnoticed but God-favored, sturdy of limb As Michelangelo later imagined him, Comely even in his frown.
Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings? Heaven itself delights in ironies such As this, in which a boy’s fingers would touch Pythagorean strings
And by a modal artistry assemble The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord, And make Saul cease to tremble.
Pythagoras is the supposed inventor of musical harmony who believed that music reflects the divine order of the stars. As Yeats references the philosopher in “Among School Children,”
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard…
In this case, the “sweet laudation of the Lord” is the psalms, which “make Saul cease to tremble.” Such is the power of art.
So I’ve voted (!!). Yesterday I mailed my absentee ballot, which is necessary this year as I will be teaching at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia when the election rolls around. My Slovenian friends are promising emotional support.
What did it feel like? I loved voting for Kamala Harris and Gloria Johnson (against Marsha Blackburn) but given that neither has a chance in hell—well, Harris has a chance nationally but not in Tennessee—I submitted my ballot with feelings of fatalistic resignation. While liberals in deep red states have little to cheer about, we vote to affirm our faith in democracy.
I am reminded of a line from a Swiss film I used to love (To Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000). A woman who has discovered Tantric Buddhism says to a political activist, “You’re a pessimist. You want your acts to have effects.” According to this logic, I would be an optimist. I don’t expect my ballot to have any effect but I vote religiously all the same.
In some ways, being in a state where most of the outcomes are pre-decided feels like being in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass world, where you can walk and walk but still end up where you began. As she leaves the looking-glass house, Alice has her sights set on a hill but never manages to arrive:
So, resolutely turning her back upon the house, she set out once more down the path, determined to keep straight on till she got to the hill. For a few minutes all went on well, and she was just saying, “I really shall do it this time—” when the path gave a sudden twist and shook itself (as she described it afterwards), and the next moment she found herself actually walking in at the door.
Nor does it help to run, as she discovers a little later after meeting the Red Queen:
“Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest a little now.”
Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”
Alice observes that “in our country, you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” According to my Swiss film quote, this means she expects her actions to have an effect, thereby revealing her to be a pessimist. The queen replies,
“A slow sort of country! Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
I’m not sure that even running twice as fast would lead to Democratic victories in this state. In fact, rather than skimming through the air, politics for liberal Tennesseans feels more like pushing Sisyphus’s rock uphill. Incremental progress gets erased in a second as the state legislature, like an out-of-control boulder, crushes various constituencies (trans youth, children in schools, pregnant women, poor people and rural hospitals being denied ACA money). Each year the legislature gets crazier.
I suppose, however, we can draw the lesson that Albert Camus did from the myth. We must appreciate this opportunity to make our voices heard, to publicly affirm our values, even if doing so doesn’t ever lead to the outcome we want. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Voting does in fact fill my heart. Existentialists like Camus and Jean Paul Sartre and Ernest Hemingway stressed the importance of a principled stand, even when all about us feels absurd, and that seems to apply here.
And perhaps our situation is not quite as hopeless as we fear. If Virginia and Georgia could vote for Joe Biden in 2020—and if Harris has a fighting chance in North Carolina and Florida and maybe even Texas—then maybe the rest of the south will eventually follow.
The Red Queen assures us that running twice as fast may at least get us somewhere else.
Further thought: Speaking of running, the impressive young head of the North Carolina Democratic Party made a Moby Dick reference in talking about Harris’s prospects in her state.
Although a pre-debate Quinnipiac poll found Harris leading Trump by three points among likely North Carolina voters, Anderson Clayton, the twenty-six-year-old chair of the state Democratic Party, knows that many national Democrats see North Carolina as the “white whale,” as she put it.
Does she mean that people fear that chasing the white whale is a fool’s endeavor, one that the Democrats—like Captain Ahab—embrace at their peril. After all, although Ahab comes close to achieving his goal, he ends up a few votes short (which is to say, he dies in the attempt). Will precious resources be wasted if they are spent in North Carolina rather than in must-win Pennsylvania?
Clayton has the Red Queen’s faith in intense running, however. Leaning on the Harris campaign to schedule a visit to rural North Carolina counties, where she is convinced the vice-president could make an impact, she says, “People get excited when they see her. People are ready to run through a brick wall.”
And if Donald Trump is like Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty sitting atop that wall, perhaps no one will be able to put him together ever again should the wall collapse. Humpty Dumpty, incidentally, shares with Trump the belief that he can create an alternative reality. Or as he puts it, “”When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
My faculty book group has been discussing Jane Eyre, which provides some of the impetus for today’s post. Add in Donald Trump’s recent creepy remarks that he is a “protector” of women, along with a friend’s observation (based upon personal experience) that America’s experience with Trump felt like an abusive relationship, and we can cast Trump as Rochester and Jane as Kamala Harris.
To this I add one more element, a student’s response about how Jane Eyre would have helped her escape her own abusive relationship if she had read it as a teen. (I recount this in my book.) All of which leads me to recommend Jane Eyre as useful election year reading.
Let’s start with Trump. This past Monday he patronizingly informed women that, with him as president, “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
Trump also assured women that, because they will be “healthy, happy, confident and free,” they will “no longer be thinking about abortion.”
These remarks, of course, are coming from a man who, as blogger Jeff Tiedrich usefully points out, is an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” consorted with notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who would barge into Miss U.S. dressing rooms while teenage contestants were half naked, and who boasts about having singled-handedly killed Roe v. Wade. With protectors like this, who needs enemies?
Rochester is no Trump (other than in his attempt to have multiple wives), but his protection offers to Jane are similarly creepy, setting her teeth on edge. First, even before she knows he is already married, he shows himself to be controlling. Against her wishes, he insists on dressing her in finery and bedecking her in jewels and, when she pushes back, makes a remark about a Turkish harem, talking about her in the third person as though she were a plaything:
He chuckled; he rubbed his hands. “Oh, it is rich to see and hear her!” he exclaimed. “Is she original? Is she piquant? I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio, gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all!”
Then, after his marriage secret is revealed, there is this unnerving interchange. If Jane were to go mad, he says, he would never treat her the way he has treated his mad wife:
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat—your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.
This existence is disturbingly similar to the life that he is in fact proposing for her. When Jane tells him that she must leave him and “begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes,” he informs her what she really means:
You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester—both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life.
Or as Trump put it on Truth Social, “I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!”
In my book I write about how a former student (I call her Theresa) recognized all the signs of an abusive relationship in the Jane-Rochester relationship. Before the wedding, Jane has been ignoring many of the warning signals because she idolizes her employer:
My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.
Theresa wrote that she recognized herself in Jane, which is how she herself ended up in trouble. Longing for a grand passion, she surrendered all sense of herself, counting on her partner to think for her and take care of her.
Jane, however, finds herself in a moment that Theresa said is one of “the shining moments in literature.” After Jane first rationalizes to herself that she is a nobody and that no one will notice what she does—”Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”—her higher self replies, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Theresa saw Jane as a heroine who can teach one “how to survive not only on human compassion but on hard work and emotional strength.” Trapped “in a circumstance as universal as a bad relationship,” Jane finds “the will power to save herself.” Theresa resolved that, should she ever have a daughter, she would introduce her to Bronte’s novel.
It’s worth noting that Jane has to fight against a second abusive relationship before the book ends, this time with the mesmerizing and strong-willed St. John Rivers. Against him too she is able to find her footing.
Thinking about the Harris-Trump election through the Jane-Rochester lens leaves me with two thoughts. First, can Trump’s often bewildering popularity with certain women—more white women voted for him than they did for either Clinton or Biden—be explained in part by the seductive lure of a predator? I think especially of Christian women who have made of him an idol, standing between them and “every thought of heaven.” They are as willing to dispense with Jesus’s teachings as Rochester is with marriage laws.
Second, the exhilaration that has accompanied the rise of Harris may be similar to stepping out of an abusive relationship. For years, we have been hunkering down, hoping that if we placated the man he wouldn’t hurt us. Now, thanks to the example of this loud and proud woman running for president, we’re squaring our shoulders and walking out the door. We care for ourselves and we’re not going back.
To be sure, if Trump’s enablers allow him to reenter our lives, we’re going to have to deal with him all over again. The prospect is so terrifying that women all over the country, along with many men, are doing all they can to stop him. Harris’s “when we fight, we win” is providing wind for our sails.
Yale history professor Timothy Snyder recently reported Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky citing Shakespeare’s best-known line to describe his country’s current situation: “To be or not to be.” While Zelensky is not, like Hamlet, contemplating suicide, Snyder notes the quote “is certainly a propos right now.”
Hamlet’s line comes in the third act when he is still reeling from all that has happened when he’s been away at college. His father has died and, without taking any time to properly grieve, his mother has married his uncle. (“The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,” Hamlet remarks to Horatio.) If, as I have argued, Hamlet is in large part a drama about grieving, then it stands to reason that the prince would be obsessed with death. In some ways, he muses, the only thing that prevents us from killing ourselves is fear of what may lie in wait hereafter:
Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Ukraine is certainly bearing its share of fardels, along with
the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely [insolence], …the law’s delay, The insolence of office…
It also has little doubt about the horrors it will experience if it loses. Surrender, which is what Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Viktor Orban, and Putin lovers throughout the world would like to see, is tantamount to suicide. As Snyder notes, the Russians “have made clear, over and over, that their goal is the humiliation and the destruction of Ukraine as a first step towards a world order in which such actions are normal.” Ukraine as an independent nation would cease “to be.” No wonder Zelensky turns to Hamlet’s stark choice to capture his situation.
Snyder says that negotiating a peace at this stage in the war will not work because “one cannot simply choose to negotiate with a power that openly seeks to bring about the end of your nation and state.” Ukraine’s only hope is to show that Russia’s attempts at destruction will end in failure. For this, it needs more help from America and the allies, who must reinforce their prior help and further supplement it. With such help, Snyder believes, Ukraine has a good chance of delivering that message.
Although Russia has been suffering unimaginable losses, however, there is one area in which it has been successful: Snyder says that it has been able to get inside America’s head. Putin’s threats of a broader conflict, the historian believes, has prompted us to slow the delivery of needed weapons and to put constraints on Ukraine’s actions (including penetrating Russian territory). Only recently have some of these been lifted. We could say of America and its allies, to take Hamlet’s words slightly out of context,
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action…
It is worth noting that, after delivering his speech, Hamlet stops ruminating and swings into action. He exposes the crime of his uncle, accidentally kills Polonius (so okay, not all action is good action), escapes Claudius’s murder plot, and, clear-eyed at last, returns to Denmark to “set things right.” Snyder is challenging the Biden administration to behave similarly, casting off any “pale cast of thought” and committing itself to this enterprise of great pitch and moment. After all, in the play’s finale the murderous tyrant is brought low.
To be sure, Hamlet himself dies in the process, but that’s not a risk that the U.S faces, having committed no troops. Zelensky, on the other hand, has shown himself more than willing to make such a tradeoff, having refused to leave the country when Russia invaded. “I need ammunition, not a ride,” he memorably told the world.
Zelensky is actually less Hamlet and more Henry V, who tells his troops,
Once more unto the breach, dear friends; Or close the wall up with our English dead.
Among the many things I never thought I’d see again is the revival of Comstockery. Thanks to billionaire Leonard Leo, the man most responsible (along with Donald Trump) for stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with radical Catholics, we are in danger of resurrecting the ghost of Anthony Comstock, anti-vice activist and United States Postal Inspector from 1873-1907. I mention him in this literature blog because Greg Olear of Prevail compares him to Victor Hugo’s villainous Inspector Javert.
The Comstock Act of 1873 made it a crime to convey obscene and crime-inciting material (including abortion-related material) through the U.S. mail. Congress never got around to repealing it since, after the 1960s, it appeared an unenforceable irrelevancy, although it did receive two further blows: one in 1971, when Congress decreed it was no longer illegal to mail contraceptives, and a second in 1973, when Roe v. Wade established a federal right to abortion. Now, however, the rightwing Heritage Foundation is promising to activate it again if Trump is reelected, and Supreme Court justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas have spoken openly of their support.
Olear says of Comstock that he was
a wet blanket in human form—a petty, prudish, conniving, vindictive, holier-than-thou killjoy whose bizarre obsession with rooting out every “matter, thing, device, or substance” that he considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” would end up terrorizing, harming, or killing women for more than a century after his emergence onto the national scene.
Then comes the Javert comparison:
Ostensibly a vice hunter, he was, in reality, an overzealous Javert who existed to torment women—especially sex radicals and early feminists, abortionists and sexologists. He was also a huge asshole personally disliked even by his allies.
With the rightwing Federalist Society having filled many judicial appointments during the Trump years, Olear says that we have started breeding an entire legion of Comstocks:
This sad, sanctimonious schmuck would be nothing more than a footnote from an ugly, retrograde, and bygone period of American history—except that Dobbs made the laws that bear his name suddenly relevant again. With the political ascendance of reactionary religious extremists like Leonard Leo and his hand-picked and like-minded weirdos honeycombing the entire judicial branch, “Comstockery” is enjoying a revival. Leo in particular seems to be almost a reincarnation of the nineteenth century vice hunter: they are both obese, self-righteous, monomanically against abortion and contraception, politically well connected, super sneaky in their methods, and funded by obscenely wealthy conservatives.
In a follow-up blog post, Olear recounts how Comstock hounded to death (through threat of imprisonment, which led to her suicide) one Ida Craddock. Craddock’s crime was authoring The Wedding Night, which informed young brides-to-be what to expect.
Now to Hugo’s legendary vice hunter, whom the author describes as a “dog-son of a wolf”:
Now, if the reader will admit, for a moment, with us, that in every man there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us to say what there was in Police Officer Javert.
The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.
Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be Javert.
Javert, like Leo, sees the world as black and white with no shading. Hugo writes,
He observed that society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,—those who attack it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity…
Whereas Leo views everything through the lens of his fanatical and rigid Catholicism, for Javert there is either respect for authority or there is deviation:
He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand, he said, “The functionary can make no mistake; the magistrate is never the wrong.” On the other hand, he said, “These men are irremediably lost. Nothing good can come from them.” …He was stoical, serious, austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, like fanatics. His glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing. His whole life hung on these two words: watchfulness and supervision. He had introduced a straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world; he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests. Woe to the man who fell into his hands!
Javert, of course, lives to track down Jean Valjean, and we watch him do so relentlessly for close to 1000 pages. There is nothing in his world, however, that prepares him for the saintly man that the former galley slave becomes, a man willing to risk his own freedom to save Javert’s life. This causes such cognitive dissonance in the mind of the inspector that he throws himself into the Seine. He can handle harsh justice but not human complexity or divine mercy.
I don’t know if Leo has this capacity for introspection. What does appear to be the case, however, is that Leo and his minions appear just as determined as Javert to track down those they regard as sinners, including women who cross state lines to have abortions. State legislators in anti-abortion states have already shown their willingness to subpoena women’s medical records, monitor their periods, and imprison any who seek abortions.
Come to think of it, it’s not only a revival of the Comstock laws we should be worried about. It appears that they want to bring back female versions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the 1857 Dred Scott decision.
As this is Banned Books Week, I’m sharing some of what I say about banning books in Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History. There I contend that censorship can work as an indirect compliment, an acknowledgement of literature’s power. (This is how Toni Morrison, whose books are amongst the most banned, regards the issue.) Indeed, book banners are sometimes more attuned to how books can unsettle assumptions and alter perspectives than some of literature’s defenders.
One of the earliest proponents of book bans was Plato, who would not allow Hesiod and Homer into his utopian republic because he feared they would inflame the passions of young men and soldiers. Surprisingly, Plato loved both authors, especially Homer, whom he could quote at length. My theory is that Plato was so affected by Homer—the visit to Hades scared the living daylights out of him—that he worried that the author’s works would prompt readers to act irrationally. Perhaps warriors, seeing death depicted so graphically, would turn tail and run when confronted with the prospect.
Plato himself had been a soldier so maybe he’s talking about himself. If I’m right, the following conversation between Odysseus and the dead Achilles so haunted his imagination that he himself quailed about the prospect of entering battle. Odysseus is attempting to console Achilles by talking about his earthly fame, but Achilles will have done of it:
Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils. Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
Better alive and unknown than famous and dead. So much for risking your life for glory.
Jump ahead 2500 years to one of the most frequently banned books in America. In my book I mention how Toni Morrison’s Beloved was featured in a gubernatorial race and explain why:
The closing Republican ad in a 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race…featured a mother complaining how her high school senior had been traumatized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved—and that therefore voters should choose anti-woke candidate Glenn Youngkin, who went on to win the election and to set up a hotline to report teachers teaching supposedly nefarious content.
…Morrison’s [rightwing] critics…have reason to fear her novel, which touches on two of the most volatile issues in American politics, race and a woman’s autonomy over her body. In the work, which earned Morrison the Nobel Prize, the pregnant slave Sethe is first sexually assaulted (White men suck milk from her breasts), then beaten savagely, and then, after she escapes and they come to reclaim her and her children, driven to kill the baby to save it from slavery. The novel is meant to be unsettling, and it can indeed challenge the worldview of those parents who don’t want their children facing up to the ugly history of racism and sexism. For Morrison as for William Faulkner, one of the authors on which she models herself, the past is not dead nor even past, and we see it return in the form of the ghost baby that haunts Sethe.
While Shakespeare usually escapes modern censors, in my book I wonder how a work like Twelfth Night has escaped. Little did I know, as I learned last week, that the comedy has in fact been banned in a New Hampshire school district, which concluded that its “jolly cross-dressing and fake-same-sex romance” violated the district’s ‘prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction.’”
That’s putting it mildly. As I note in my book,
Imagine Twelfth Night: or What You Will (1601-02) being taught in such a way as to foreground its strong gender identity themes, which fascinate young people struggling to make sense of who they are. In the comedy, we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity.
To which I add,
If teachers did more to advertise the play as a chance to explore gender identity, inviting their classes to explore their feelings about each of these characters, they could well generate new excitement amongst students, including some who would otherwise groan over a Shakespeare reading assignment.
I go on to say that I can understand why teachers and librarians might shy away from playing up these aspects of the play. To continue from the book,
Who needs to add angry parents and (in Florida) the threat of lawsuits to an already long and overwhelming list of responsibilities? Why detonate a literary bomb in the classroom? It’s a version of the choice African American poet Langston Hughes once described when his poetry became more political. “I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such,” Hughes writes in “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” “But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police.”
So for understandable reasons, teachers and librarians often play it safe, sidestepping literature’s disruptive potential. But as I note in the book,
Unfortunately, when English teachers play it safe, they risk underplaying literature’s fierce urgency and its ability to speak directly to our life struggles. Taming literature down to a boring irrelevancy leaves its potential untapped. Students go unchallenged in ways that could lead to real and exhilarating growth.
I often say of literature what is said of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Lucy asks, “Is he safe,” Mr. Beaver replies, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
The books that Moms for Liberty and other organizations are banning are not always safe. They may indeed help transform children in ways that ideologically rigid parents won’t approve. But if these students are to thrive in a complex and often bewildering multicultural democracy, not to mention global village, they need the life tools offered them by good books.
Allowing children to read freely is like allowing women to have bodily autonomy. Trump, J.D. Vance, and the U.S. Supreme Court may not want women making their own decisions, but that’s because they are more interested in control than in women taking charge of their own needs and desires. For their part, children and teens often recognize, in a deep way, the fiction they need in order to thrive, and their teachers and librarians—who pay close attention to them—also recognize what they need.
So yes, literature classrooms and libraries offer students the prospect of radical transformation. As they do so, they terrify certain parents.
